An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode (tutorial)

This 3 hour tutorial helps you understand the unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems that impinge on the implementation of Unicode-based applications.

It doesn't provide detailed coding advice, but focuses on essential concepts and requirements you must understand to deploy Unicode-based solutions, and does so across a representative range of all the world's scripts (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek). It also provides memorable examples to help you understand the buzzwords used in the rest of the conference and your future work with Unicode.

The tutorial starts with basic character encoding principles, but goes much further, covering things such as input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards, and more. It has a proven track record as an orientation for newcomers to the conference, but also appeals to people at intermediate and advanced levels, due to the breadth of concepts discussed and the way they are related to real-world script usage. No prior knowledge is needed.