Re: unicode?

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

>> For Unicode text in UCS-2 or UCS-4 format, it's just a straight array of
>> character codes.

AL> Emmm... that would be a bit too easy.
AL> For most scripts, things are more or less this way.

[lots of good information snipped]

In perhaps more practical terms, UTF-16 text (the format used on MS
platforms by default) may be considered as a simple array of short
integers representing glyph indices.  This will work fine for a number
of languages, including most of the languages written in the Latin,
Greek or Cyrillic script, as well as Chinese and Japanese.  (The story
for Korean Hangul is a little more complicated.)

It will not work for some Latin-script languages (for example, the
``extended'' orthography for Lithuanian) which need combining
characters.  It will not work for scripts that require more complex
processing, such as Arabic or Devenagari.  It will not work for
scripts encoded outside of the BMP (the first 2^16 characters of
Unicode) -- but there are none for now.

                                        J.