The document discusses the Unicode character encoding standard. It describes how earlier 8-bit character encoding systems were limited and could not represent all languages, which led to many conflicting encoding systems. Unicode addressed this by providing a universal encoded character set that could represent every character for all present and historic written languages, with each character assigned a unique numeric value. The Unicode standard aims to facilitate international exchange of text and language-independent software.

1. Unicode
Sidhartha Sahoo
sidhartha@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
3/11/2008 UNICODE

2. Content…
Introduction
Problem of character encoding
What UNICODE is Exactly
From ASCII to Unicode
The Logic of Unicode
Multiple Forms
Benefits for India
Unicode Consortium
3/11/2008 UNICODE

3. Introduction…
Computers at their most basic level just deal with
numbers. They store letters, numerals and other
characters by assigning a number for each one.
In the pre-Unicode environment, we had single 8-
bit characters sets, which limited us to 256
characters max. No single encoding could
contain enough characters to cover all the
languages.
so hundreds of different encoding systems were
developed for assigning numbers to characters.
3/11/2008 UNICODE