Universal Character Set Characters
The Unicode Consortium (UC) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) collaborate on the Universal Character Set. (UCS). The UCS is an international standard to map characters used in natural language (as opposed to programming languages for instance) characters into numeric — machine readable — values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate and transmit UCS encoded text strings from one to another
ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably. However, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character: what one might thing of as its address. While a character in UCS 10646 includes the combination of the code point and its name, Unicode adds many other properties to the character set. Together, these properties further define each character.
In addition to the UCS Unicode also provides other implementation details such as:
- transcending mappings between UCS and other character sets
- different collations of characters and character strings for different languages
- an algorithm for laying out bidirectional text, where text on the same line may shift between left-to-right and right-to-left
- a case folding algorithm
Computer software end users enter these characters into programs through various input methods. Input methods can be through keyboard or a graphical character palette.
Read more about Universal Character Set Characters: Divisions of UCS, Special Code Points, Characters Grapheme Clusters and Glyphs
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