Characters as Data

Computers were originally built to process numbers. Over the last few decades, they've become increasingly better at handling text as well, but the transition from human scribbling and beautiful typography to bits and bytes has been complicated. Going from a paper document to a computerized representation of that document means learning about how the computer handles text, and requires learning about characters, character codes, fonts, and encodings. Unicode provides a set of solutions for some of these problems, while retaining presentation flexibility for making text look as we feel it should.