The tutorial will provide you with a good understanding of key requirements for implementing writing systems in information technology. It will do this by examining real examples of a wide range of modern scripts to discover features that a computerized implementation must support.  It will also make special reference, where appropriate, to how the Unicode Standard points the way forward for meeting these requirements.

The tutorial does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment, across a wide range of scripts. It will also constitute an excellent orientation for newcomers to the conference, providing the background needed to assist understanding of the other talks!

The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input and storage of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, and more.

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

While the tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it will also benefit people at an intermediate and advanced level, due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is needed.