Xah's Unicode Tutorial

The following is a index on essays and tutorials related to Unicode.

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What's Unicode

• UNICODE Basics: What's Character Encoding, UTF-8, and All That?
• the Journey of a Foreign Character thru Internet
• Unicode Popularity on Web by Google
• Best Fonts for Unicode
• Unicode Character Shows Blank, Question Mark, Gibberish

Gallery of Symbols in Unicode

• Sample Unicode Characters

• Math Symbols
• Matching Brackets
• Arrows

• Computing Symbols
• Dingbats, Map Signs, Weather Signs, Cultural Symbols
• Unicode 6 Emoticons

• Drawing Lines, Boxes, Shapes
• Geometric Shapes (circle, square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon, …, variations)
• Egyptian Hieroglyph Characters

• Punctuation and Printer's Symbols
• Unicode Full-Width Characters

Examples of Real World Use of Unicode

• Diacritics: Trema, Umlaut, Macron, Circumflex, and All That
• English Phonetics: IPA vs American Heritage Dictionary vs Merriam-Webster
• Intro to Chinese Punctuation with Computer Language Syntax Perspectives
• Linguistics: Zhuyin (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ), Pinyin, IPA, Comparison
• 简体/繁體 字表 (Simplified/Traditional Chinese Characters List)

• Emacs's Keybinding Layout
• A Short Survey of Keyboard Shortcut Notations
• Math Font, Unicode, Gothic Letters, Double Struck
• The Moronicities of Typography: Hyphen, Dash, Quotation Marks, Apostrophe

• Mac OS X Keyboard Viewer and Unicode
• How to Create a APL or Math Symbols Keyboard Layout
• Unicode: W3C Proposed Icons {Image, Video, Sound File, Trash, Keyboard, Mouse, …}

Unicode Support in Computer Languages

• Unicode Support in Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript, Java, Emacs Lisp, Mathematica
• Character Sets and Encoding in HTML
• HTML/XML Entities (Character/Unicode/Symbol) List
• Using Unicode in HTML Attributes
• Unicode in Perl ＆ Python
• How Mathematica does Unicode?
• Unicode in Java
• Linden Scripting Language (LSL) Unicode Support

Unicode Support in Tools

• Unicode Support in File Names: Windows, Mac, Emacs, Unison, Rsync, USB, Zip
• Web Browsers Unicode Support; Firefox 4 Sucks
• Unicode Character Equivalence Support in Web Browsers
• Unicode Font Comparison: Arial Unicode MS vs DejaVu Sans

Processing Unicode

• Python's unicodedata Module
• Python: Converting a File's Encoding
• Converting Charset Encoding with Java

Unicode ＆ Emacs

• Emacs and Unicode Tips
• Emacs Unicode Browser (xub-mode)
• Emacs Math Symbols Input Mode (xmsi-mode)
• Emacs Keyboard Macro Example: Insert All Unicode Bullets
• Unicode: Carbon Emacs 22 vs Emacs 23
• Emacs: Remapping Keys Using key-translation-map

Syntax, Semantics, Design

• Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages; ASCII Jam vs Unicode
• Unicode BOM Byte Order Mark Hack
• Syntax Design: Use of Unicode Matching Brackets as Specialized Delimiters
• Syntax Semantics Design: Use of Unicode Ellipsis Symbol vs Dot Dot Dot
• HTML Entities, Ampersand, Unicode, Semantics
• URL Percent Encoding and Unicode
• Designing a Math Symbols Input System
• Unicode Semantics: Turn A Gundam
• Semantics of Symbols: Examples Unicode Symbols Usage

Recommended Unicode References

• Unicode Standard, Version 5.0 amazon
• Unicode Explained (2006), by Jukka K Korpela. amazon
• CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean ＆ Vietnamese Computing (2008), by Ken Lunde. amazon
• Fonts and Encodings (2007), by Yannis Haralambous. amazon