Unicode in Squeak


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Unicode in Squeak

Last updated at 2:04 pm UTC on 11 November 2010

Squeak 3.8g includes Unicode support mostly done by Yoshiki Ohshima in the last six years. In short, a few people have produced a lot of good work, but more is needed, especially regarding the visual display of text.

See

Multilingual Support
Multilingual Squeak
Squeak 3.8: Multilingualization Resources by Boris Gaertner. This includes a nearly complete bitmap font.

References

Joel Spolsky's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)"
The Unicode Standard: A Technical Introduction includes an overview of Unicode conformance in 5 points, which are worth reproducing here:
- characters are from the common repertoire;
- characters are encoded according to one of the encoding forms;
- characters are interpreted with Unicode semantics;
- unassigned codes are not used; and,
- unknown characters are not corrupted.
Contents listing of the latest version of The Unicode Standard
The Internet community's latest specification of UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646.
The Unicode Standard is code-for-code identical with International Standard ISO/IEC 10646:2003, Information Technology—Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS). The two standards converged in 1992 and 1993, as detailed in The Unicode Standard's "Relationship to ISO/IEC 10646"
Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals ("Charmod" in the jargon)

The printed, bound edition of The Unicode Standard 4.0 costs $60+tax (USD) in California, $60 (USD) in the USA and Canada, and $60+shipping (USD) around the world. The Unicode Consortium publishes the standard online without charge for access. Still, the book is worth the money for the serious implementor: 1504 large pages of expert typography and clear figures, printed in high-quality ink in fine resolution on acid-free, semi-glossy paper. To print your own copy from the online PDF documents would cost a small fortune in paper and either toner or ink. A local bookstore may have a used copy.

Is Unicode good enough?

Suzanne Topping, an expert in internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n), explores objections to The Unicode Standard in "The secret life of Unicode: A peek at Unicode's soft underbelly".

"Unicode" is a trademark of, and "The Unicode Standard" is a registered trademark of, Unicode, Inc.

Planning an implementation strategy

The Design and Implementation of Multilingualized Squeak, a whitepaper by Yoshiki Ohshima and Kazuhiro Abe.