Introduction
This introduction briefly describes the Unicode standard and explains the terms used in the application and the rest of
the help contents.
The Unicode Standard
Unicode is a standard for character encoding in computers, that is developed and released by the Unicode Consortium.
Character encoding means that letters are encoded into numeric values, that can be handled by computers. Defining
and using a standard for this task enables all systems, that use a common standard, to exchange text files without
problems. Unicode therefore defines a unique numeric value for every letter of various languages in the world and is
used by many computer systems and manufacturers.
Unicode Tables
The letter definitions are published on the website of the Unicode Consortium as plain text files and in other formats.
In the scope of this application the term Unicode table refers to the plain text files, specifically the "allkeys" version.
The "allkeys" files contain the letter values and additional informations. The numeric value for every letter is called
its codepoint, which is a hexadecimal value. Additional to the codepoints, the allkeys tables contain informations
on how to sort the letters in the different alphabets. These informations are called the collation of a letter.
They are groups of hexadecimal values that are used with sorting algorithms. The third and last information for a letter
is a describing comment. The letters can be grouped into blocks, i.e. all letters of one language or alphabet.
Unicode Viewer
The aim of this application is to provide a tool that makes it possible to browse Unicode tables in a more comfortable
way than with a common text editor. It provides functions to load the text files and displays the contained informations
in a manageable table. Its search functionality aims to ease finding specific letters by any of their attributes in the
"allkeys" table. For advanced users it provides a programmable console, which allows easy access to all functions of the
graphical user interface and to define own new functions.
Further Reading
If you are completely new to Unicode, the website of the Unicode Consortium provides much better information:
http://www.unicode.org/.
If you want to start using the application, Browsing Unicode explains the first steps.