User Guide

FontLab 4

The Unicode Standard

The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard (that’s the full name of the

Unicode standard) is a character coding system designed to support the

interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse

languages of the modern world. In addition it supports classical and

historical texts of many written languages.

In the Unicode standard a character is identified by a double-byte index.

The standard potentially can cover 65535 characters in a “basic plane” and

much more using plane switching. In the current version of the standard

(3.2) several hundred thousand indexes are defined. That covers almost all

currently used languages, some historical languages and many pictorial

characters.

FontLab can only work with Unicode indexes from the basic plane (which

potentially can cover 65,535 indexes).

The Unicode standard is used in TrueType fonts as the main character

identification method. In principle TrueType fonts may be encoded with

other standards, but in Windows Unicode is always used.

We recommend visiting the Unicode Consortium official Web site at:

http://www.unicode.org

to get more information about this standard.