This tutorial has become a regular feature at Unicode conferences over recent years due to highly enthusiastic audience feedback.

The tutorial will provide you with a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, and get you thinking about the problems involved in implementing such scripts in products. It does not go into detail about implementation, but provides an excellent basis for understanding fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment (and the talks in the rest of the conference!), whatever the language in question.

The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input of ideographs, context-dependant shape variation, diacritic placement, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, indexing, keyboards, etc., etc.

The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi, Russian and Greek.