Unicode - der unbekannte Weltstandard (original) (raw)

Thank you very much for inviting me to present the project decodeunicode in the keynote to today's conference-it is an honour for me to be here. decodeunicode is a project initiated by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in the German city of Mainz and, as such, is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In the first part of my talk I would like to give a brief overview of the history of character encoding from telex to Unicode-seen through the eyes of a typographer … followed, in the second part, by an introduction to the project decodeunicode. 1.1 The BMP Poster Allow me to begin with a practical experience we made during our work on the project. One fine day, in our mailbox we found a simple rtf document sent by the programmer of our database, Wenzel S. Spingler. At 512 K, the document was rather small in size, but it contained an idea both simple and beautiful. With the help of an AppleScript, Wenzel had typeset in one document all 65,536 characters of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)-one after the other, code point by code point. This, indeed, looked interesting enough for us to decide and make a poster of it which would retain a maximum of the rather special look the original raw text data had.