Now many Operational
Systems support Unicode, which enables to represent all existing alphabets
throughout the world. Nevertheless Unicode is not yet well known by potential
users of telematics applications so to encourage standards some reference
materials are needed.
The Unicode
Standard is the universal character encoding standard used for representation
of text for computer processing. It is fully compatible with the International
Standard ISO/IEC 10646-1; 1993, and contains all the same characters and
encoding points as ISO/IEC 10646. The Unicode Standard also provides additional
information about the characters and their use. Any implementation that
is conformant to Unicode is also conformant to ISO/IEC 10646.
Unicode provides
a consistent way of encoding multilingual plain text and brings order to
a chaotic state of affairs that has made it difficult to exchange text
files internationally. Computer users who deal with multilingual text --
business people, linguists, researchers, scientists, and others -- will
find that the Unicode Standard greatly simplifies their work. Mathematicians
and technicians, who regularly use mathematical symbols and other technical
characters, will also find the Unicode Standard valuable.
The design
of Unicode is based on the simplicity and consistency of ASCII, but goes
far beyond ASCII's limited ability to encode only the Latin alphabet. The
Unicode Standard provides the capacity to encode all of the characters
used for the written languages of the world. It uses a 16-bit encoding
that provides code points for more than 65,000 characters. To keep character
coding simple and efficient, the Unicode Standard assigns each character
a unique 16-bit value, and does not use complex modes or escape codes.
While 65,000
characters are sufficient for encoding most of the many thousands of characters
used in major languages of the world, the Unicode standard and ISO 10646
provide an extension mechanism called UTF-16 that allows for encoding as
many as a million more characters, without use of escape codes. This is
sufficient for all known character encoding requirements, including full
coverage of all historic scripts of the world.