The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 [Hardcover]

The Unicode Consortium (Author), Joan Aliprand (Author), Julie Allen (Author), Rick McGowan (Author), Joe Becker (Author), Michael Everson (Author), Mike Ksar (Author), Lisa Moore (Author), Michel Suignard (Author), Ken Whistler (Author), Mark Davis (Author), Asmus Freytag (Author), John Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201616335 | ISBN-13: 978-0201616330 | Publication Date: February 16, 2000

The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 is THE authoritative source of information on the Unicode character-encoding standard, which makes it possible to create global software and share data across languages, nations, and locales worldwide. Encompassing all of the world's widely-used scripts and character sets, Unicode represents the foundation for international software; it is already supported by Java TM, Windows NT/2000, NetWare, QuickDraw GX, and many other environments and applications. This authorized guide documents all essential elements of Unicode 3.0, including its basic principles, code charts, implementation techniques, and rules for conformance. It contains up-to-the-minute coverage of the latest scripts included in Unicode 3.0, as well as more than a decade's implementation experience from the world's leading experts in multilingual applications.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Unicode

• Characters for all the languages of the world
• The standard for the new millennium
• Required for XML and the Internet
• The basis for modern software standards and products
• The official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646
• The key to global interoperability

The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0

The authoritative, technical guide to the creation of software for worldwide use.

Detailed specifications for Unicode:

• Structure, conformance, encoding forms, character properties, semantics, equivalence, combining characters, logical ordering, conversion, allocation, big/little endian usage, Korean syllable formation, control characters, case mappings, numeric values, mathematical properties, writing directions (Arabic, Japanese, English, and so on), character shaping (Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil, and so on)

Expanded implementation guidelines by experts in global software design:

• Normalization, sorting and searching, case mapping, compression, language tagging, boundaries (characters, word, lines, and sentences), rendering of non-spacing marks, transcoding to other character sets, handling unknown characters, surrogate pairs, numbers, editing and selection, keyboard input, and more

Comprehensive charts, references, glossary, and indexes:

• Codes, names, appearances, aliases, cross-references, equivalences, radical-stroke ideographic index, Shift-JIS index, and more

CD-ROM

The comprehensive Unicode Character Database for:

• Character codes, names, properties, decompositions, upper- ,lower-, and title cases, normalizations, shaping

International, national, and vendor character mappings for:

• Western European, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Russian, and others
• Windows, Macintosh, Unix, and Linux

Unicode Technical Reportsthat extend the standard for:

• Sorting, displaying, normalizing, linebreaking, compression, serialization, regular expressions, CR/LF, XML, case mappings, and more

0201616335B04062001

About the Author

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend, and promote the use of the Unicode Standard. The membership of the Consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. The Unicode Consortium actively cooperates with many of the leading standards development organizations, including ISO/IEC JTC1, W3C, IETF, and ECMA.

0201616335AB07232003

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1072 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (February 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201616335
• ISBN-13: 978-0201616330
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.9 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,384,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate ABC Book, January 20, 2001

By 

Jim Allan (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 (Hardcover)

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars UNICODE is a work in progress, February 14, 2001

By 

"mfjr" (Amagasaki, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 (Hardcover)

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Everything you ever wanted to know about Unicode, July 7, 2000

By 

H. Treftz (Aurora, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 (Hardcover)

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.