Unicode Consortium
| Unicode Inc.
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|---|---|
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| legal form | Incorporated |
| founding | 1991 |
| Seat | Mountain View , California , USA |
| management | Mark Davis (President) |
| Branch | Software engineering |
| Website | www.unicode.org |
The Unicode Consortium (Unicode, Inc.) is a non-profit organization under California law, the Unicode - standard developed and publishes. The consortium is financed exclusively through membership fees. Membership is open to all natural and legal persons worldwide who are willing to pay the membership fee and to get involved in the goals of the organization. Many large software companies such as Adobe Inc. , Apple , Microsoft , Google , IBM , Oracle and SAP belong to the Unicode consortium.
The President of the Unicode Consortium is Mark Davis from Google.
The Unicode Consortium works closely with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which publishes the ISO 10646 standard , which is fully in accordance with Unicode in terms of character encoding . The further development of the ISO 15924 standard ( script codes ) has been officially delegated to the Unicode consortium.
History of the standardization of coding systems
One of the earliest forms of digitization was the Morse code . This was ousted from the telegraph network with the introduction of teleprinters and replaced by the Baudot code and Murray code .
In the early electronic data processing were about 60 different codes in use before the 1972 fixed 7- bit - ASCII standard has largely prevailed. As the name ("American Standard Code for Information Interchange") suggests, ASCII was originally used to represent characters in the English language. Various national modifications of the ASCII standard were specified in ISO standard 646 .
The ISO-646 coding did not offer the possibility of displaying data encoded with different national character sets at the same time. For example, while retaining the ASCII coding for the lower 128 characters, the code space in ISO 8859 was expanded to 8 bits (256 characters) in order, for example , to be able to display most of the special characters of European languages at the same time.
Even an 8-bit code does not offer enough space to accommodate all special characters at the same time, which is why there are 15 regional versions of ISO 8859 alone. The definition of a usable Chinese character set in 8-bit coding is out of the question. The increasing internationalization, however, requires a uniform character coding to ensure the smooth exchange of documents. Today, Unicode is the indispensable standard for the international, electronic exchange of information.
Joseph D. Becker made his first attempts with a 16-bit code in the early 1980s at Xerox PARC . The first computer with 16-bit fonts was the Xerox Star in 1981 , but it did not have any commercial success. Becker designed the Unicode Standard 1.0 with friends from Apple in 1990. In 1991 the Unicode Consortium was founded.
literature
- Jacques André: Caractères numériques: introduction. In: Cahiers GUTenberg. Vol. 26, May 1997, ISSN 1257-2217 , pp. 5-44, (in French).
- Johannes Bergerhausen, Siri Poarangan: decodeunicode. The characters of the world. Hermann Schmidt, Mainz 2011, ISBN 978-3-87439-813-8 .
- Yannis Haralambous: Fonts & encodings. From Unicode to advanced typography and everything in between. Translated by P. Scott Horne. O'Reilly, Beijing et al. 2007, ISBN 978-0-596-10242-5 (in English).
- Peter Karow: Digital Fonts. Presentation and formats. 2nd improved edition. Springer, Berlin et al. 1992, ISBN 3-540-54917-X .
Web links
- Unicode website (English)
- About the history of Unicode (English)
- ISO 15924 Registration Authority (English)
- Articles of Association of Unicode Inc. (PDF; English)