The Unicode standard promises a utopia in which any user anywhere can write a document in any language (or any combination of languages) as easily as he can write a document in English. Everyone will acknolwedge we're a long way from this utopia, but I don't think I realized just how far from it we still are.

I just finished my first book, "Unicode Demystified." As you might imagine, to explain all of the complications and subtleties of the Unicode standard, you have to have examples of text in all (or at least most) of the writing systems Unicode can represent, and this book has lots of them. Producing the examples and incorporating them into the text was, by far, the biggest headache involved in producing my book. It involved not just locating fonts and working around their absence, but surmounting a plethora of software incompatibilities and dealing with the biggest obstacle of all, the author's own ignorance. In this informal talk, I'll share my experiences with you, discussing what I tried, what didn't work, and what did work.