Unicode

Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all languages to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers.

For detailed information, refer to the Unicode Standard.

The following table lists some of the Unicode terms commonly used in the Uniface documentation.

Unicode Terminology
Unicode concept Description
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) The set of characters whose code points are in the range 0000 to FFFF. The BMP contains characters for almost all modern languages, and a large number of special characters.
Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) Characters whose code points are greater than FFFF. The SMP is mainly used for historic scripts and for musical and mathematical symbols.
Primary Private Use Area Code points in the range E000 to F8FF. This area is reserved for Unicode users to define their own characters.

In Uniface, the assignment setting $GAIJI is used to designate this area for Japanese Gaiji characters or for private use.

Supplementary Private Use Area-A Code points in the range F0000 to FFFFD.
Supplementary Private Use Area-B Code points in the range 100000 to 10FFFD.

This area is reserved for Uniface users.

UTF-8 Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit. A variable-length Unicode character encoding format that can represent every character in the Unicode character set.