Unicode Community

By Raveesh Gupta - Localization, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is an organization of major computer corporations, software developers, database vendors, international agencies and various user groups and was formed in 1991. Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India is a full member of Unicode Consortium.

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry.

Unicode and ISO

Unicode and International Standards Organisation (ISO) joined hands to bring out the international character code standard in 1992, known as Unicode standard Version 1.0. Unicode version 1.0 used somewhat different names for some characters than ISO 10646. In Unicode version 2.0, the names were made the same as in ISO 10646. Version 3.0 was published in February 2000. Unicode is now a 16-bit form of the larger ISO10646, 32-bit standard.

Unicode version 1.0 used somewhat different names for some characters than ISO 10646. In Unicode version 2.0, the names were made the same as in ISO 10646. Version 3.0 was published in February 2000. Unicode is now a 16-bit form of the larger ISO10646, 32-bit standard. The Unicode Consortium fully endorses the use of any of these encoding forms as a conformant way of implementing the Unicode Standard. In all, the Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 provides codes for 49,194 characters from the world's alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections. These all fit into the first 64K characters, an area of the code space that is called basic multilingual plane, or BMP for short.