The Unicode Standard

For the first couple decades of computing the user interfaces for most operating systems and applications required knowledge of the English language. ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, became the first widely used standard for encoding textual information. At that time other languages than English were usually not supported by common software, and the use of writing systems other than the basic Latin alphabet was completely unthinkable.
Today, people all over the world use computers and, naturally, they expect user interfaces that use their own native language and script.
Unicode is a standard for the encoding of textual information in any major writing system. This includes alphabetic writing systems such as Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic, as well as ideographic writing systems like Han or Hangul/Jamo.
In addition to defining the necessary 16-bit code mappings, Unicode also specifies a number of algorithms that are important for internationalized text processing. Examples for such algorithms are canonical ordering, character combining behaviour and bidirectional writing.

The International(ization and) Unicode Conference

Around 1997 I had probably my most "active" time concerning Unicode. I wrote several papers that were published in the proceedings of the International Unicode Conference (IUC):

Design and Implementation of a Unicode Word Processing System in Java (session B5)
Proceedings of the 10th International Unicode Conference, Mainz, Germany, March 1997
New Developments for the Implementation of Unicode Word Processing Systems in Java (session A13)
Proceedings of the 11th International Unicode Conference, San Jose, CA, September 1997
Universal and Efficient Compression of Unicode Character Streams (session C16)
Proceedings of the 11th International Unicode Conference, San Jose, CA, September 1997

The MATHEMA FontManager

Most of this research is now more than 5 years old and therefore hopelessly out of date. Probably the main result of my work with Unicode was the MATHEMA FontManager (MFM), a Unicode font rendering system for Java. It was originally developed for JDK 1.0.2, which only internally supported 16-bit Unicode characters but, besides that, had almost no capabilities for actually displaying Unicode documents and did not support any of the basic algorithms stipulated by the Unicode Standard (version 2.0 at that time).
For a short time, the MATHEMA FontManager was way ahead of the game, but eventually the Unicode support in the JDK caught up and MFM became obsolete.

Exclusively for personal reference and noncommercial use, the MATHEMA FontManager is available for download here. It is intellectual property of MATHEMA Software GmbH and may not be redistributed without prior consent of MATHEMA. It comes with absolutely no warranties and MATHEMA provides no support whatsoever.
Besides being an interesting piece of Unicode history, the MATHEMA FontManager is probably of very little practical use in current Java environments. The MFM is known to run with JDK 1.0.2 and 1.1.x and was also reported to run with some early versions of JDK 1.2. However, it has never been tested with JDK 1.3 or newer (which does not mean that it wouldn't run, though; see for yourself).

The MATHEMA FontManager, version 3.0.0
The ZIP file contains the complete MATHEMA FontManager including demos and full documentation.

Download ZIP file (1350 KB) Courtesy of

Links

The Online Edition of the Unicode Standard, Version 3.0
The homepage of the Unicode Consortium
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ