The term Unicode refers to a standard system of characters created to allow easy handling of computing, visualization and transmission of writings of various languages and technical disciplines, but it also includes classic texts from dead languages. In other words, and in a more specific way, Unicode is a common character format, which contains each of the keyboard characters of a computer. According to what is stated, the term derives from the three objectives pursued which are universality, uniqueness and uniformity.
Unicode especially supplies a unique number for each of the characters, without the implication of the platform, the language, the program, which facilitates the transfer between different coding systems and platforms. As you can see , Unicode does not cover only letters, but there are also symbols, numbers and others.
A character encoding defines a table that represents characters as numbers. Each character is associated with a number. In Unicode this number is called a code point. The predecessor of Unicode is known as “ASCII”, with the difference that the latter included only the characters that were used in the English language.
Said standard is supported by the UTC acronym for the Unicode Technical Committee, integrated into the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization, in which large and famous companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Adobe are part with different degrees of implications , IBM, SAP, Oracle, or entities such as the prestigious University of Berkeley and individual professionals and academics. The Unicode Consortium maintains a very close relationship with ISO / IEC, with which since 1991 it has had an agreement to synchronize its standards that contain the same characters and code points.
