Benefits of the Unicode™ Character Standard

The benefits of the Unicode Character Standard are listed and an example of each benefit is provided.


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Benefits of the Unicode Standard
Benefit Example
Also see: Compelling Unicode Demo
Allows for multilingual text using any or all the languages you desire. Invoice or ticketing applications can print customer information in their native languages from a single database.
Having just one way to process text reduces development and support costs, improves time-to-market, and allows for single version of source code. One version of the product can be used worldwide.
Separate releases for regional markets are eliminated.
Standards insure interoperability and portability by prescribing conformant behavior.
(Applications conforming to Unicode also conform to ISO 10646.)
Applications process text consistently and conformance is verifiable.
Text in any language can be exchanged worldwide. Eliminates data corruption and other problems due to incompatible code pages or missing conversion tables.
Support of Unicode by all modern technologies extends application life and broadens integration possibilities. Applications supporting Unicode may take advantage of new technologies and integrate with other applications.
Widespread industry support provides platform and vendor independence. Microsoft, HP, IBM, Sun, Unisys operating systems,
Oracle, Microsoft, Progress databases, and many others support Unicode.
See the products supporting Unicode.
Practical and apolitical design due to the diverse, international, industry and academic membership of the Unicode® Consortium. Members include computer corporations, software producers, database vendors, research institutions, international agencies, user groups, and linguistic specialists.
See the Unicode membership list.
Easy conversion from legacy code pages. Unicode's comprehensive character set is a superset of existing code pages. Numerous cross mapping tables provided at: Unicode mapping tables.
Internet-ready for use in E-business. Internet standards, such as XML, Perl, Java and JavaScript are Unicode-based
Continuous evolution extends application lifetime and expands capabilities to meet future needs. Unicode Version 4.0 supports all modern languages, including 96,000+ characters.
See the The number of characters in the Unicode Character Standard
Also see the Unicode Consortium press announcements for recent releases of Unicode.

For more information, see the following:

Richard Cook's Four-letter words associated with the Unicode Standard, at Unicode: What is it good for?.

Suzanne Topping's The Secret Life of Unicode: A Peek at Unicode's Soft Underbelly, at IBM's developerWorks.

XenCraft's Benefits of Standards Participation


Unicode® Consortium links used in this web page:

Products supporting Unicode

Unicode Mapping Tables

Unicode Membership List

What Is Unicode?

Unicode: What is it good for?

Unicode Consortium press releases
Version 3.0 of the Unicode™ Standard Released
Version 3.2 of the Unicode™ Standard Released
Version 4.0 of the Unicode™ Standard Released

Created by Tex Texin