Unicode® Tutorials and Overviews

This page provides a brief guide to tutorials and other sources of information about the Unicode Standard, intended for use by educators. Topics range from broad tutorials to technical papers on specific topics.

Overviews and FAQ

Technical Introduction

TheTechnical Introduction to the Unicode Standard contains a very general overview of the basic principles of the standard.

The Unicode Standard

The definitive resource for information about the Unicode Standard is the latest version, coupled with any currently posted updates and errata.

FAQ

The Unicode FAQ provides a topically organized list of answers to commonly asked questions about the Unicode Standard, internationalization, emoji, and other areas of interest.

Topical Documents

Unicode Technical Notes

The Unicode Technical Notes (UTNs) cover a variety of specialty topics, some of which may be of interest to educators. Linguists and language students may be interested, for example, in Deborah Anderson's Recommendations for Creating New Orthographies.

Unicode Technical Reports

The Unicode Technical Reports (UTRs) focus on specific topics related to the Unicode Standard, such as the encoding model and security issues.

Tutorials

Eric Muller's Unicode Tutorial

This slide tutorial with narrative is in PDF format. It is available both as a slide set, or slide set with comments. This tutorial takes about 4 hours to present.

Asmus Freytag's Unicode Tutorial

A commercial tutorial by Asmus Freytag is available from his web site: http://home.ix.netcom.com/~asmus-inc/Tutorial5.0/index.html.

Richard Ishida's Tutorial on Indic Scripts

This UTN tutorial Introduction to Indic Scripts by Richard Ishida gives a good overview of many issues, including history, development, and encoding.

Richard Ishida's Unicode Tutorial

This tutorial, An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode, is available as a set of Web pages. It presents the key concepts in Unicode using examples from writing systems around the world. The material should be accessible for a wide audience, from software engineers to managers. It takes about 3 hours to present

W3C Articles and Tutorials

The W3C maintains an Articles & Tutorials page with general and specific tutorial information on internationalization topics, including the Unicode Standard. You can also drill down to specific information using the Learn to internationalize page.

Other Presentations

Globalizing Software (Powerpoint; Markus Scherer and Mark Davis)

Unicode Overview (Powerpoint; Markus Scherer and Mark Davis)

Migrating Software to Supplementary Characters (Powerpoint; Mark Davis and Vladimir Weinstein)

Unicode from a Distance (Powerpoint; Mark Davis)

Unicode Myths (PDF; Mark Davis)

Other Resources

The Unicode Resources page offers useful links to various resources, including fonts, keyboards, tools, and pointers to other information that can be used to supplement tutorials and to provide hands-on experience.

The Unibook Character Browser, available for download, can be used to look at Unicode code charts in a variety of ways.

The I18nGuy website has information on a Compelling Business Example for Unicode which may be of interest to business educators. Also on that site is a page about the Benefits of Unicode.

Web Services and Internationalization by Addison Phillips

Lists of books and articles related to the Unicode Standard.