Unicode is a 16-bit character set standard, designed and maintained by the non-profit organization named Unicode Consortium. Unicode is not a glyph encoding. The same character can be displayed as a variety of glyphs, depending not only on the font and style, but also on the adjacent characters. A sequence of characters can be displayed as a single glyph or a character can be displayed as a sequence of glyphs. Which will be the case, is often font dependent.[1]
History[]
Unicode was originally designed to be universal, unique, and uniform so that the code would cover all major modern written languages (universal), each character was to have exactly one encoding (unique), and each character was to be represented by a fixed width in bits (uniform).[1]
Parallel to the development of Unicode, an ISO/IEC standard was being worked on that put a large emphasis on being compatible with older 8-bit character codes, such as ASCII and ISO Latin 1. To avoid having two competing 16-bit standards, the two teams compromised in 1992 to define a common character code standard, known both as Unicode and Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Since the merger the character codes are the same but the two standards are not identical. The ISO/IEC standard covers only coding while Unicode includes additional specifications that help implementation.[1]
Emoji was first standardized internationally in Unicode 6.0, released in 2010. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the West.[2] In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the Word of the Year.[3][4]
Apple and Unicode[]
Mark Davis, the co-author of KanjiTalk and WorldScript at Apple Computer,[5][6] co-founded and became the president of the Unicode Consortium.[7]
In 1998, Mac OS 8.5 introduced support for Unicode through Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI) 1.0, which initially operated alongside the older WorldScript text engine.[8] With the transition to Mac OS X, WorldScript was phased out in favor of ATSUI with its Unicode support.[9] As ATSUI itself was based on the transitional Carbon API, it was also deprecated in favor of Core Text with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) in October 2007.[9][10]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Unicode at the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing. 2002-08-06.
- ↑ "How Emojis took center stage in American pop culture", NBC News, July 17, 2017.
- ↑ Oxford Dictionaries 2015 Word of the Year is an Emoji. PBS Newshour (November 17, 2015).
- ↑ Philiop Seargeant. The Emoji Revolution: How Technology is Shaping the Future of Communication. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- ↑ Unicode History by Axel Rauschmayer, Speaking JavaScript: An In-Depth Guide for Programmers p.357. 2014-02-25.
- ↑ Macintosh Plus J-model 漢字Talk1.0 KanjiTalk1.0 by furui_ringo, Instagram. 2019.
- ↑ Meet the shadowy overlords who approve emojis by Tracy Lien, Los Angeles Times. 2016-01-26.
- ↑ Mac OS 8.5, 8.5.1, 8.6 and Developers, Apple Developer. Archived 1999-10-09.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Overview of ATSUI, Apple Developer Connection. Archived 2003-09-18.
- ↑ Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review, by John Siracusa, Ars Technica. 2007-10-28.
