zdzlc@21cn.com wrote:
> Who can tell me where can I download the unicode standard?
> thank you!!
The Unicode Standard is available in book form ("The Unicode Standard,
Version 3.0," Addison-Wesley (2000), ISBN 0-201-61633-5, list price
USD 49.95). Significant hints and updates can be obtained from the
Unicode Web site at www.unicode.org and from this mailing list.
When you talk about "downloading the Unicode Standard" (presumably for
free), you are probably thinking about the code charts, which show, for
example, that the character at U+0EAE is LAO LETTER HO TAM and show a
representative glyph for that character. These charts are a good start,
and they are indeed available for free (start at charts.unicode.org).
But the Unicode Standard is much more than just code charts, because
support for all the world's scripts involves more than just stringing
glyphs together left-to-right. The standard includes all sorts of
information concerning directionality, classes of characters, combining
characters, sorting, and so forth. Development of this standard has
cost a lot of really bright minds a lot of man-hours, and that is why
you have to shell out 50 bucks for a thousand-page book to get the full
Unicode Standard. If you really want to implement Unicode properly, it
is well worth the price.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:17 EDT