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Unicode: Unicode Support
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Unicode includes a mechanism for modifying character shape and so greatly extending the supported glyph repertoire. This covers the use of combining diacritical marks. They get inserted after the main character (one can stack several combining diacritics over the same character). Unicode ... contains precomposed versions of most letter/diacritic combinations in normal use. These make conversion to and from legacy encodings simpler and allow applications to use Unicode as an internal text format without having to implement combining characters. For example é can be represented in Unicode as U+0065 (Latin small letter e) followed by U+0301 (combining acute) but it can also be represented as the precomposed character U+00E9 (Latin small letter e with acute).
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[F]ar, Unicode has appeared simply as a means to assign a unique number to each character used in the written languages of the world. The storage of these numbers in text processing comprises another topic; problems result from the fact that much software written in the Western world deals with 8-bit character encodings only, with Unicode support added only slowly in recent years. Similarly, in representing the scripts of Asia, the double-byte character encodings cannot even in principle encode more than 65,536 characters, and in practice the architectures chosen impose much lower limits. Such limits do not suffice for the needs of scholars of the Chinese language alone.
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Unicode supports numerous scripts used by languages around the world, and ... a large number of technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. The supported scripts include, but are not limited to, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Han, Hangul, Hiragana, and Katakana. Supported languages include, but are not limited to, German, French, English, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Unicode currently can represent the vast majority of characters in modern computer use around the world, and continues to be updated to make it even more complete.
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Unicode includes a mechanism for modifying character shape and so greatly extending the supported glyph repertoire. This is the use of combining diacritical marks. They are inserted after the main character (it is possible to stack several combining diacritics over the same character). However, for reasons of compatibility, Unicode ... includes a large quantity of precomposed characters. So in many cases there are many ways of encoding the same character. To deal with this, Unicode provides the mechanism of canonical equivalence.
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By offering Full National Language and Unicode Support, Genio 7 removes the complexity of integrating data encoded in different character sets. This new functionality allows Genio customers to treat data equally regardless of its origin, accelerating business systems integration projects and facilitating the distribution and exploitation of data across the entire organization.
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Since a large number of applications are still code page-based, and since you might want to support Unicode internally, there are a lot of occasions where a conversion between code-page encodings and Unicode is necessary. The pair of Win32 APIs, MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte, allow you to convert code-page encoding to Unicode and Unicode data to code-page encoding, respectively. Each of these APIs takes as an argument the value of the code page to be used for that conversion. You can, therefore, either specify the value of a given code page (example: 1256 for Arabic) or use predefined flags such as:
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Unicode Support