Unicode is a
computing industry standard for the consistent representation and manipulation of
text expressed in most of the world's
writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the
Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as
The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000
characters covering 90 scripts, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard
character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower
case, a set of reference data
computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for
normalization, decomposition,
collation, rendering, and
bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as
Arabic or
Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).