Target Audience: Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst

Level of Session: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

The advent of multilingual information processing with Unicode requires the designer to have a deeper knowledge of rendering characters for display and printing than is necessary for a single script, like Latin. Rendering technology that is adequate for one language of the Latin script, like English, may prove totally inadequate for scripts such as Arabic or Devanagari. This presentation introduces a framework to characterize a character in terms of its information, associated shape (or glyph) and the relationships between these two attributes. It first differentiates between the domains of characters and of glyphs, and when it is appropriate to do processing in one domain versus the other. Next, it describes three different technologies used to render Unicode characters into glyphs. Finally, it describes several design considerations.