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Short URL: https://scripts.sil.org/WSI_Guidelines_Sec_5_4

Guidelines for Writing System Support: Technical Details: Characters, Codepoints, Glyphs: Part 4

Peter Constable, 2003-09-05

5.4  Further reading

There are many related topics that are not addressed in this brief introduction. The next four sections go into more detail on encodings (including Unicode), data entry, glyph design and rendering. The following resources may also provide greater depth into particular topics:

To learn more in detail about codepoints and the ways in which abstract characters are encoded in terms of bytes, see Unicode Technical Report #17. This discusses these issues specifically in relation to the Unicode standard, but that can be helpful for understanding the issues in general since the Unicode standard actually has multiple ways to encode its characters in terms of byte sequences. The introduction to Graham [GRA2000] is also somewhat useful in this regard (although this has some unfortunate typographic errors). Section 6 of this document also discusses these issues.

For more information on character encodings used with Microsoft Windows, see Constable [CON2000b], Kano [KAN1995], or Hosken [HOS1997]. For information on multi-byte character encoding standards for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, see Lunde [LUN1999]. Information on a variety of character encoding standards is available in the reference section of the Microsoft Global Software Development Web site:  http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/default.asp. The introduction to Graham [GRA2000] is also somewhat useful.

For further information on implementing software to work with multilingual text on Microsoft Windows, see Kano [KAN1995], Constable [CON2000a], and Hosken [HOS1997]. Other useful information is available at the Microsoft Global Software Development Web site (see above), and in the Microsoft Developer Network Library, which is available online at  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp.

For greater depth on a variety of topics related to WSIs, see Lyons [LYO2001].

5.5  References

[CON2000a] Constable, Peter. Understanding multilingual software on MS Windows. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2000. Available in CTC Resource Collection 2000 CD-ROM, by SIL International.

[CON2000b] Constable, Peter. Unicode issues in Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2000. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2000. Available in CTC Resource Collection 2000 CD-ROM, by SIL International.

[GRA2000] Graham, Tony. Unicode: A primer. Foster City, CA: M&T Books, 2000.

[HOS1997] Hosken, Martin. Windows and codepages. NRSI Update #8. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 1997. Available in Resource Collection 98 CD, by International Publishing Services. Dallas, SIL International. Also available in the CTC Resource Collection 2000 CD-ROM, by SIL International.

[KAN1995] Kano, Nadine. Developing international software for Windows® 95 and Windows NT™. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1995. Also available online at  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/books/devintl/S24AE.HTM.

[LUN1999] Lunde, Ken. CJK Information Processing. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999.

[LYO2001] Lyons, Melinda, ed.. Implementing Writing Systems: An Introduction. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2001.

[WHI2000] Whistler, Ken, and Mark Davis. Unicode Technical Report #17: Character Encoding Model. Available online at  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17/

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