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> Sorry - I thought it was clear from my description. Everyone is |
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> using the word 'unicode' in the definition of 'unicode', or so it is |
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> seeming to me. I've managed to get far enough to understand it's a |
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> different way of expressing font usage, I guess, but I don't |
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> understand when someone would want it or when they would not need it. |
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do you know utf8, do you know latin1, ISO-8859-15 or other things like |
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these? |
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Anyway: |
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unicode ist an approach to assign one number to each "letter" or "sign" |
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that is out there in the world. That's all. |
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Well, in latin1/ISO-8859-1 you only have a basic rule: 1 byte per character |
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You see? Only 1 byte, only 256 numbers and so only space for 256 |
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characters - but there are >3000 chinesese symbols. |
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So latin1 is a european charset and it contains most of the |
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character/signs europeans need. But the trouble is: if an application |
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internally works with latin1 only, how should it reprensent the chinese |
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symbols? |
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Think of your webbrowser: you can use it, to view european pages and |
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also chinese pages. Yes, your browser uses unicode internally and that's |
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very practical, because in unicode, he can represent every |
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character/sign that's out there. |
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Greetings, |
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Sven |