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The Unicode Standard Version 5.0
Book Review by Bruce K. Haddon,
as rendered into ISO 8859-1 by Steve Gaede
Edited by Julie D. Allen, Joe Becker, Richard Cook, Mark Davis, Michael Everson, Asmus
Freytag, John H. Jenkins, Mike Ksar, Rick McGowan, Lisa Moore, Eric Muller, Markus Scherer,
Michel Suignard, and Ken Whistler.
Addison-Wesley
October, 2006.
1417 pages + 49 front pages + CD.
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-48091-0 (ISBN-10: 0-321-48091-0)
The Unicode Consortium was formed late in the 1980's, to create a universal and unified
character set and encoding. At about the same time, the International Organization for Standards
(ISO), and its International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) started work on a similarly
targeted project, which became the ISO/IEC 10464 standard. At this point, the Unicode
Consortium has sponsored the publication of all versions of the Unicode Standard, and represents
the only conforming implementation of ISO/IEC 10646.
The Unicode Standard Version 5.0 comes with so many endorsements from the computerati
famous that this publication of the Standard appears to be an all-time first, rather than a version
"5"Ñthose listed endorsing the book are: Shai Agassi, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Brian E. Carpenter,
Vint Cerf, Bill Gates, James Gosling, Tytti Granqvist, Kazuhiro Kazama, Brendan Kehoe, Donald
E. Knuth, Tim Marsland, Steve Mills, Makoto Murata, James O'Donnell, Larry Page, Hugh
McGregor-Ross, Bertrand Serlet, Richard Mark Soley, Joe Spolsky, Guy L. Steele Jr., Kazunori
Ukigawa, Guido van Rossum, John WellsÑand there is an invitation to see more at the Unicode
web-site (http://www.unicode.org). They cannot all be wrong!
The intervening fifteen years have seen remarkable strides in coming to both an intellectual
understanding of the problems of a universal character set, a compilation of rules for encoding it,
and an exposure of some of the underlying questions of the ways human language is used for
communication. It is, in fact, quite astounding that an effort that started out to encode a character
set embodying all writing systems in current use has became the current enterprise to encode a
character set containing all writing systems that have ever been used (or shall be used). It says
something about the commonality of human writing systems that encoding symbols into a linear
array of codes seems to work for all of them. Or maybe those for which it does not work have
simply been omitted, but this really does not appear to be the case.
The newly published Version 5.0 of the standard appears to retreat a little from the sheer size of
Version 4.0 (which, at 1462 pages, exceeded Version 3.0 by 422 pages). However, appearances
are deceiving. Although Version 5.0 has fewer pages, and is in an octavo size (10 x 7.5 inches)
rather than the previous American letter size (11 x 8.5 inches), the typeface and character tables
are more compact. The result is a more manageable and more easily read book that contains
considerably more data.
The real body of the book, the code charts, is now a chapter later, and occupies the middle third
of the book (460 pages, c.f., 776 in Version 4.0), describing 99,024 characters (c.f., 96,248),
attesting to the more compact printing. The new characters come from N'Ko, New Tai Lue,
Buginese, Glagolitic, Coptic, Tifinagh, Syloti Nagri, Balinese, Phags-pa, Old Persian, Phoenician,
Kharoshthi, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform. Other additions include extensions for Arabic and
Ethiopic scripts, and for Biblical Hebrew texts.
The first third of the book, some 562 pages, is about the history, structure, principles, and use of
the Unicode character set and its encoding. This is where the difficult topics of writing direction,
combining forms, decomposition, conformance, spacing, numerical use, casing, properties, etc.,
of the characters themselves are presented, together with the discussions of the features of the
scripts themselves. This part of the book by itself is a reference on the principles of written
communication, and is a thorough education, even without going further.
The last third of the book, approximately 390 pages, contains the Han radical stroke index,
essential to locating specific Han ideographic characters within the Han ideographic set, and all
the appendices, including the notational conventions, reprints of the Technical Standards and
Reports, the detailing of the relationship of the Unicode standard to the ISO/IEC 10646 Standard,
and how the Versions have changed. In particular, Appendix F states the formal stability policies
adopted by the Unicode Consortium. This latter work becomes increasingly important as the
Standard grows, and many more organizations adopt the use of the Standard.
Even though there is now a large number of places where Unicode is used (in at least one of its
transformational formats), it remains true that there is still a large number of computer and
information technology professionals who are not familiar with the true range of the Unicode
Standard encoding. "Isn't it just a sort of big ASCII?" is an attitude that is still encountered. One
really does not have to go far to step outside the range of ASCII. To just pose the question,
"Where is Québec?" is sufficient to break an ASCII editor; and to drop the accent makes as much
sense to the French reader as dropping the a's out of "Alabama" does to a Southern reader. The
prevalent ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set addresses that problem, yet it does not allow for the
mention of Québec and
in the same sentence. The need for computer programs to
communicate with users globally can no longer be considered a luxury.
The work of the Unicode Consortium continues in many areas. Under the heading of "Issues for
Public Review" at the official website are currently listed three areas of concern to the processing
of text, and one concerning programming languages, each addressed by proposed updates to
Unicode Annexes. The text processing topics are Line Breaking Properties, Text Boundaries, and
Unicode Normalization Forms. The latter is of deep concern to the question of identifying
"equivalent" strings, under differing degrees of equivalence. In particular, attention is being paid
to the idempotency of normalization and the stability of the Unicode definition in order that the
normalization of assigned characters will not change in future versions of Unicode. The other
area, Identifier and Pattern Syntax, concerns itself, amongst other matters, with a uniform and
consistent approach within the programming languages that support the Unicode character set for
identifiers
So, why buy this book? The Version 5.0 Standard itself answers this question, and lists, in
addition to other advances, that "four fifths of the figures are new; two-thirds of the definitions
are new; one-half of the Unicode Standard Annexes are new; one-third of the conformance
clauses are new; one-fourth of the tables are new." As good and great as the Version 4.0 Standard
was at its time of publication, it is definitely now obsolete. And then there is the question this
reviewer asked when Version 4.0 was released: "is there a reason to buy the 'printed-on-paper'
version?" Although the online and electronic files are both essential and invaluable, you do need
to know for what it is you are looking amongst that material. For education, for being able to see
the BIG picture, and the whole context, there is still no adequate alternative to the printed book.
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