Unicode Tutorials and Overviews

This is a brief guide to tutorials and other sources of information about the Unicode Standard intended for use by educators. Topics range from broad tutorials to technical papers on specific topics.

The Unicode Standard

The major resource for information about the standard is the web page for the latest version, coupled with any current updates and errata.

Technical Introduction

The Technical Introduction contains a very general overview of the basic principles of the standard.

Unicode Technical Notes (UTNs)

The Unicode Technical Notes (UTNs) cover a variety of specialty topics, some of which are of interest to educators. Linguists and language students may be interested in Deborah Anderson's Recommendations for Creating New Orthographies.

Eric Muller's Unicode Tutorial

This slide tutorial with narrative is in PDF format. It is available both as a slide set, or slide set with comments. This tutorial takes about 4 hours to present.

Asmus Freytag's Unicode Tutorial

A commercial tutorial by Asmus Freytag is available from his web site: http://home.ix.netcom.com/~asmus-inc/Tutorial5.0/index.html.

Richard Ishida's Tutorial on Indic Scripts

This UTN tutorial Introduction to Indic Scripts by Richard Ishida gives a good overview of many issues, including history, development, and encoding.

Richard Ishida's Unicode Tutorial

This tutorial, An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode, is available as a set of Web pages. It presents the key concepts in Unicode using examples from writing systems around the world. The material should be accessible for a wide audience, from software engineers to managers. It takes about 3 hours to present

Presentations by Mark Davis and Others

Globalizing Software (Powerpoint; Markus Scherer and Mark Davis)

Unicode Overview (Powerpoint; Markus Scherer and Mark Davis)

Migrating Software to Supplementary Characters (Powerpoint; Mark Davis and Vladimir Weinstein)

Unicode from a Distance (Powerpoint; Mark Davis)

Unicode Myths (PDF; Mark Davis)

Other Resources

The Links to Unicode Resources page offers useful links to various resources, including fonts, small tutorials, and pointers to other information that can be used to supplement tutorials and provide hands-on experience.

The Unibook program, distributed on the Unicode website, can be used to look at code charts in a variety of ways.

The i18nguy website has information on a Compelling Business Example for Unicode which may be of interest to business educators. Also on that site is a page on Benefits of Unicode.

The W3C maintains a page "W3C Web Internationalization Articles" with general and specific tutorial information, including Unicode. You can also drill down to specific information using the Techniques Index.

Web Services and Internationalization by Addison Phillips

Language and Locale Identifiers: A Status Report is a paper given at the 27th Internationalization and Unicode Conference
 

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