Characters and Languages

The chapter describes some IT-related requirements of different languages and writing systems, such as how to deal with right-to-left writing (a common source of confusion). This includes transliteration, transcription, and simplifications. The interaction between encoding, language, and font settings is described. Moreover, language codes, language metadata, and language markup are described, illustrated with XML examples.

Information about the language of text is more important when using Unicode than with older character codes. The reason is that the unification principle of Unicode (described in Chapter 4) removes many distinctions between language-dependent variants of characters. For example, Unicode often uses the same code position for a Chinese character and a historically and semantically related but different Japanese character. To express the difference, you would include information about languagee.g., by using markup.