Useful Resources

About this List

This page contains a number of resources pertaining to Unicode and Internationalization . These references are provided for informational purposes only.  In particular, the Unicode Consortium has not taken any steps to evaluate or verify the usefulness or accuracy of the information provided.

For additional information, refer to FAQ, Articles on Unicode, Books on Unicode or to  Unicode Enabled Products  for a sample list of products that are reported to be fully (or partially) Unicode-enabled.

If you have any updates to this list, please contact the Unicode office. This should include:

• Category (from the above)
• URL 
• Brief description of the page/site content

Fonts and Keyboards

Adding Fonts to Java

Shows how to enable the use of Unicode fonts (such as Arial Unicode MS) with Java

Adhuna Keyboard [BornoSoft Keyboard Interface Package] 

UNICODE compliant Bengali/Bangla keyboard driver that uses only lower case phonetic English key input for Bengali output.

Aksharamala

A standards-based software tool which automatically transliterates English input into a target Indian lanaguage.

ALT Keyboard Combinations

ALT keyboard Combinations (in Dutch)

A convenient and handy list of ALT keyboard combinations

Assamese Phonetic Keyboard 

Assamese Online Dictionary

Avro Keyboard - UNICODE Compliant Free Bangla Typing Software

A full featured UNICODE supported FREE Bangla typing software with most popular Bangla keyboard layouts from Bangladesh and India.

Burkina Faso (In French only)

Keyboards and dictionaries for languages of Burkina Faso

Bangla

Word processor, Unicode converter, text to speech, customizable keyboard, translator, calendar and more for Bangla with Unicode support.

Bangla

Freeware Bangla Unicode Typing Interface, with a choice of keyboard layouts

Bangla Unicode Fonts

Free Unicode complaint OpenType Bangla fonts.

Free Bangla Fonts Project

Releases of four GPLd Bangla (Bengali) Open Type Fonts with full Unicode support

Celtic (Michael Everson)

Everson Mono and other fonts

Chinese (Los Angeles Chinese Learning Center)

A guide on Chinese characters input methods

Code2000 (James Kass)

A shareware Unicode font

Devanagari Editor

Displaying and Typing Japanese Characters

A guide on displaying and typing Japanese characters using Unicode

Dvorak and QWERTY keyboard drivers

For Windows. Support a large and growing number of scripts. Most of these keyboards furnish all of the characters in the relevant Unicode ranges.

Edward Trager's index of free/libre fonts

Europe Keyboard

An international keyboard layout based on the German standard layout, intended for practically all languages written using the Latin script including e.g. Vietnamese, Yorùbá. (Information on the website is in German language)

Every Known Font site

This site is down until further notice. Check Typesource by Proxy

Fingertipsoft Cyrillic Character Set and Keyboard Information

Fontboard

Free Arabic, Cyrillic, Esperanto, Hebrew, Maltese and Yiddish keyboard layouts and a small selection of special fonts for linguists and card players.

Fonts for Kurdish Language

Site contains 33 free Unicode fonts for Kurdish Language with support of Farsi and Arabic, as well as necessary keyboard installator for Windows.

Fonts, Keyboards and Browsers Setup (Alan Wood)
Fonts By Range

Information on the Unicode fonts available for each Unicode range

Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Hundreds of free Unicode fonts, with sample images from each

Gaelic for US hardware & UK hardware (Ciarán Ó Duibhín)

Downloadable free software keyboard layouts for Windows 2000/XP which offer a number of accented and other characters from the Unicode character-set via dead keys for use on US and UK keyboard hardware respectively.
They are primarily intended to support characters found in the Gaelic language, but can be useful more generally.

Fonts in Cyberspace

Links to many sources of multilingual fonts, both encoded with Unicode or a custom codepage

Free Dictionary Project

Hindi Conversion Tools

Hindi Editor (Matthew Blackwell)

Indic Support for Linux

Unicode Devanagari font in Mozilla

International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode

International Phonetic Alphabet (linguiste.org)

for Windows 95 and 98, and does not support Unicode.

JLG Latin Extended Keyboard (For US Keyboards)

Freeware which allows users to input over 1000 Unicode characters.

Junicode (Peter S. Baker)

A Unicode-based font for medievalists. 

Keyboard Layout Editor and Generator

Works with Windows 9X, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Supports Unicode (when installed in Windows NT 4.0. or Windows 2000)

Keyboard Wizard

A keyboard management utility for Windows® applications, which allows to enter text in any language supported by Unicode.

KeyPixy 

Unicode keyboard for the SuperWaba virtual machine on PDAs

Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode

Language samples in UTF-8  (Michael Kaplan)

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSLKC)

Myanmar in Unicode

Nepali Conversion Tools

Quick Key 5.1

The ideal solution for people who need to input foreign characters or mathematical symbols quickly, but do not want to spend time learning a new keyboard layout. Inserts any Unicode character with a single click

Romanian Academic v2.0  by Sorin Paliga

Romanian Academic is set of keyboard layouts for the Mac OS, which includes a Unicode keyboard compliant with the Romanian national standard SR-13392/1998.

Romanian Keyboard by Cristian Secara (links to a website in Romanian)

Romanian keyboards for Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Romanian UF by Florin Neumann

Romanian UF is Romanian Unicode keyboard layout for Mac OS X v10.2 or later, designed for users of US QWERTY keyboards.

South Asia Language Resource Center (University of Chicago)

Tavultesoft Keyman 6.2

Unicode keyboard input mapping system for Microsoft Windows. Keyboard layouts for use with Keyman are available for many languages, and custom keyboard layouts for both simple and highly complex scripts can be quickly designed and packaged for distribution with Keyman Developer. Supports Unicode input in Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista.

Type It

A set of online Unicode-based text editors designed for typing national characters in a variety of languages, as well as symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The editors include buttons and keyboard shortcuts to enter characters without memorizing Alt codes or installing any software, and can be used from any computer with Web access.

Unicode Character Map

Free and fast online method to select Unicode characters to paste into forms or other apps

Unicode implementations for uncommon scripts on MAC OS X

Includes Burmese, Cherokee, Inuktitut, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tibetan, and soon to be released Limbu support

Unicode keyboard layout generator for the Mac OS (Alex Eulenberg)

Generates 'uchr' keyboard resources, which can be used in Mac OS 9 (with Unicode script) or OS X.

TrueType Explorer

Displays the Unicode ranges supported by a font, and all the glyphs for a given range. It also displays Panose classification, Name strings, Kerning pairs and supported code pages.

Unicode Characters Pickers by Richard Ishida

HTML-based. Quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. Covers Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Devanagari, Basic Ethiopic, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, IPA, Latin & diacritics, Malayalam, Tamil, Thai, Tifinagh.

Unicode Code Converter by Richard Ishida

This dynamic HTML app helps you convert between Unicode character numbers, characters, UTF-8 and UTF-16 code units in hex, percent escapes, and Numeric Character References (hex and decimal).

UniView by Richard Ishida

HTML-based. Look up characters, character blocks, paste in and discover unknown characters, store your own info about characters, search on character names, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc. Supports Unicode 5.0

UTF-8 Sampler

A plain-text web page in UTF-8 including brief texts many scripts in both proportional and fixed fonts.

VietIME 1.0

A cross-platform Vietnamese input method editor (IME). Enable input of Vietnamese Unicode text in Java's AWT (TextArea and TextField) and Swing text components.

Vietnamese Fonts on MAC OS X

Describes how to enable the Vietnamese Unicode font which is standard in Mac OS X

Website Tips for Designers: Fonts.

 3-D Keyboard

Linguistics and Script Specialty Sites

Akkadian

Database of Latin letters and various other scripts and languages

Interactive query engine for a database of extended Latin letters as well as other scripts used by various languages. It is maintained by Indrik Hein of Estonian Standards.

Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
Digital South Asia Library

The Humanities Computing Laboratory (formerly Duke Humanities Computing Facility)/WinCALIS

Encyclopedia of Typography and Electronic communications

Contains information on using Unicode and ISO 10646, Internet technology, multilingual script terminology, font architecture, character set and encoding standards, and visual human language communication arts. It is edited and maintained by John M. Fiscella.

FarsiWeb Project

Persian script in Unicode and other standards.

HK-SCS

HKSCS Compatibility Issues Migrating to Unicode 5.0

Khmer

A web page relating to Khmer in Unicode compiled by Maurice Bauhahn

Middle English Manuscripts represented on the Web with UTF-8

Multilingual Computing Resources (Mark Leisher)

Multilingual Project Gutenberg

MyMyanmar.net

A new Myanmar Linguistic, Unicode and Research information website

Southeast Asian Computing and Linguistics  

(Doug Cooper)

TITUS

Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien

Specialized site dealing with historical linguistic work and ancient scripts

Uyghur Computer Science Association (UCSA)

Provides free Uyghur Unicocde fonts, software, technical support for Uyghur language processing and more.

Uyghur Unicode Based Website

Online Uyghur input techniques, fonts and keyboard layout, FAQ on Uyghur Unicode, UKY to traditional Uyghur converter and other multidirectional converters, Uyghur software information, and more.

Vietnamese-Unicode FAQs

Zvon character search

it finds properties of Unicode characters and determines its usage in XML documents. It also enables search of HTML and MathML entities and searches based on visual similarity. A browse by Scripts, Blocks, or Digits is also enabled.

Organizations and Other Standards

Banking Symbols Reference

Character Set Tables (Frank da Cruz)

Chinese GB 18030 Encoding Standard

An extensive summary with enough information to describe the encoding structure and to prepare an implementation

Danish UNIX System User Group Website (DKUUG)

Site includes link to extensive ftp archives, as well as information about standardization and Unix systems

DKUUG ftp archive of documents related to I18N
DKUUG ftp archive of ISO documents related to character standardization

European Union

Official website of the European Union (EU), available in 20 different languages

Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS)

A character set developed by the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It contains Chinese characters specific to Hong Kong and supplements Unicode/ISO 10646 and Big-5.

IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority)

email to: iana@iana.org

IANA Character Set Registry 

IETF Home Page

Explains internet standards

Internet Drafts
ISO Addresses

ISO International Register of coded character sets
ISO 8859 Character Sets

email to: Roman Czyborra

ISO 10646 Online

ISO 8601 (DateTime Standard)

ISO 639-1 Registration Authority

ISO 639-3 Registration Authority

ISO 639 language codes

ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency

ISO 3166 country codes

ITTF's Publicly available Standards and Technical Reports

LISA

Consisting of over 200 corporate clients and their globalization solutions partners -- the LISA provides best practice, business guidelines and multi-lingual information management standards for making enterprise globalization become a reality.

Localization Research Centre

The LRC, based at the University of Limerick in Ireland, is the focal point and the research and educational centre for localisation.

Michael Everson

New script proposals, other character encoding and internationalization standards documents, font information, and more.

Markus Kuhn's FAQ on international standards
NISO Home Page

the whole ANSI/NISO Z39.53 list (last revised 7/19/93) is at:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/languages/
updates are at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/langann.html

Postal Address Guide (Frank da Cruz)

This page also includes the names of countries in native script encoded in UTF-8.

Postal Codes and Address Resource List (Graham Rhind)

A very comprehensive guide to postal address conventions and codes around the world.

TC46 Transliteration Links

UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems

MARC 21 Specifications (including mapping tables to UCS/Unicode)

Thai IT Standards National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)

RFC's and Internet Standards

SIL Ethnologue

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Internationalization Activity

XML Schema Datatypes

Date /time information

Training and Courses

Certification in Localization at California State University in Chico, CA.

Using Unicode

ANSI C implementation of UTF-8

Converts UTF-8 into UCS4 and vice versa. Source code is BSD licensed.

Bangla Unicode Converter

Posted by the Hunger Project-Bangladesh

C++ Unicode Implementation

Chinese Tools (Erik Peterson)

Big5/GB/Hz to UTF-8 Converter and Chinese Character Dictionary in UTF-8

Chinese/Norwegian (Ingar Holst)

Online dictionaries between Chinese and Riksmål Norwegian. Under construction.

Chinese ideographs and their Cantonese pronunciation
cpDetector (Achim Westermann)

Allows to sort large collections of documents by their codepage, to transform large collections of documents to a target codepage (e.g.: into utf-8), and can be used as a java library for codepage detection that may be used for 3rd party software (search engines, file sharing software, browsers, any software that accesses textual data over network)

CPG-Nuke 8.2, CPG-Dragonfly CMS

Open Source CMS/Portal

Data on Languages

A useful web interface to a database of Unicode characters, and codepage conversions.

Decode Unicode

Delphi Graphics and Unicode Center (Mike Lischke)

A unique resource for all Borland Delphi users who need to deal with more than just plain ANSI text. Download a must-have Unicode core library which contains code for wide string manipulation as well as search engines for tuned Boyer-Moore and Unicode regular expression. The Unicode Syntax Edit control particularly important for all those who want to include wide string scripting support into their application. Free for non-commercial use and comes with full source code.

EarthWords

Multilingual web pages developed using some 20 different Unicode ranges including Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil, Thai, Lao, Georgian, Ethiopic and Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

EDICODE

Allows entering Unicode characters into a text field by simply pressing buttons labeled with corresponding glyphs. There are button sets for some European languages as well others covering a few Unicode blocks

FAIRY

A Web server extension that makes it possible to show text with any formatting of any language in all browsers on all platforms.

Ethiopic - Sadiss 1.0

Unicode text editor for Ethiopic for Java 1.4.0 or above. Includes Ethiopic font, keyboard layout for Ethiopic, Unicode character entry, text search, UTF-8, locale support, help, samples,...

Field Guide to Chinese Characters (Clopper Almon)

An index to over 3,600 common characters with links to Unihan. The indexing is by the new RADICODE system combining English names of 100 meaningful radicals and stroke codes (not counts) for the rest of the character. Said to be faster, easier, and less arbitrary than the traditional system with 214 radicals and stroke counts.

French (Phillipe Deschamp)

Contains material regarding French language standards and cross-postings for other standards bodies

German

List of countries, with full names, codes, adjectival forms for country and inhabitants, and capitals.

Hanzi 3.0

CD-ROM software for the Macintosh, MS-Windows, and DOS operating systems. Wenlin tackles the most frustrating obstacles for students, scholars, and speakers of Chinese with its versatile and easy-to-use interface.

Hebrew Jony Rosenne

IBM developerWork™

Section of the site discussing Unicode related issues

I18ngurus

Open internationalization resources directory. The site currently provides 900+ links on internationalization and Unicode resources on the internet classified by category and actively monitored.

Internationalization (Alex Schonfeld)

using Java and other resources

Internationalization (Tex Texin)

The Benefits of Unicode, The number of characters in the Unicode Standard, and An Introduction to the Business Example for Unicode are just a few of many interesting topics addressed in this website.

ITworld.com

IT articles that refer to Unicode

Japanese, Chinese and Korean (Ken Lunde)

CJK resources and information, Japanese code manipulation tools, etc.

Mellel by Redlex

Mellel is an affordable word processor for the Mac OS X platform, with extensive Unicode support and specialized features for Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages.

Multilingual Support in Internet/IT Applications

NameMap Class

A bidirectional map between Unicode 3.0 character names and the corresponding values for use in Java programs.

Polish Resources

Useful information about Unicode for Polish Users

Polyglot 3000

Automatically recognizes over 400 languages. Comes with full Unicode support.

Private Use Areas

How they are used by Software Vendors

Punjabi Computing Resource Centre

Includes a free Unicode 4.0 GPL font called Saab for Gurmukhi (the first of its kind). Also has a conversion utility (Gurmukhi Unicode Conversion Application) to convert from font-based Gurmukhi to Unicode.

Roland Hentschel utilities

SC Unipad editor

A Unicode text editor for Windows operating systems from Sharmahd Computing

Special Characters Mapping Tool for Web Designers

Sun's Solaris 7 & 8 operating environments and Unicode

Unicode, multilingual computing, and software internationalization. Technical concerns of Unicode in an internationalized application. Codeset conversions.

Testing Tamil and Telugu

The Unicode HOWTO

Bruno Haible's guide to using Unicode/UTF-8 with GNU/Linux systems.

The Unicode Workflow

Johan van Mol's guideline for web developers on how use UTF-8 in their web projects. The article covers the whole process of creating a website: forms, XML, databases, the encoding of script and source files, HTML output and e-mail output.

Tommy's Unicode Library 1.2

Troll Tech's About Unicode

uni2ascii/ascii2uni

A pair of programs that convert between UTF-8 and a variety of pure ASCII representations.

Unibook

A small utility for offline viewing of the character charts and character properties for The Unicode Standard

UnicodeChecker version 1.5

Allows to browse the complete Unicode character set and view extensive information on every code point. The info is taken from various Unicode 3.2 data files in the UNIDATA directory. Furthermore, it can directly convert strings to the four Unicode Normalization Forms. Runs on MacOX X 10.1 and later.

Unicode Database

Characters in Html/Xml ordered by block, category, bidi-class and additional properties. The version of each codepoint is shown.

Unicode Glyph Lookup by hexadecimal code

unidesc/uniname/unihist/ExplicateUTF8/utf8lookup

A set of programs for finding out what is in a Unicode file.

Unicode Data Browser

A browser for the UnicodeData.txt file

Unicode Input Tool/Converter Firefox Extension

View Unicode characters, values, and character descriptions in chart and optionally output to a textbox. Also converts among character references (hex or decimal), HTML entities, and Unicode. Several preferences allow a great degree of customization including adding one's own DTD for use in entity conversions.

UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux

Markus Kuhn's comprehensive information resource on how to use Unicode/UTF-8 on POSIX systems.

UTF-8 encoding table and Unicode characters

Reference site displaying Unicode code points with their UTF-8 encoding in a number of numerical formats.

UTF-8 Search

Alta Vista introducing UTF-8 as one of their search encodings

UTF-8 Test

A good source of test pages and listings of alphabets in UTF-8.

VARTALAAP

A multilingual, interactive communication system

WebTide

A freeware html editor, written in Java, which integrates support for Unicode

XML and Unicode

Websites extensively using Unicode

Unicode Project in German Wikipedia

A presentation of the Unicode blocks and a translation of the Unicode descriptions in German

 

Wikipedia

A multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia making pretty extensive use of Unicode.

 

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