To:           Andy Feibus <ANDYFE@OST.COM>
 
Dear Andy,
 
I'd like to make two clarifications to your article about Unicode in the
April 25, 1994 edition of _Open Systems Today_.
 
1.  In 1991, people from the Unicode Consortium and the ISO working group
developing ISO/IEC 10646 met at three meetings to work out an agreement
to *merge* the two codes.  (At the time, both had the same goal, to encode
the world's characters, but the philosophies and implementations were
incompatible.)  The result was a merger of features from both Unicode V1.0
and the ISO/IEC draft international standard 10646:1990.  In 1992, the
national standards organizations voted to adopt the second version of
the ISO/IEC 10646 draft international standard as an international
standard.  ISO published the standard as ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 and it is
available from ANSI (American National Standards Institute) in New York
City.  Meanwhile, the Unicode Consortium updated its code and Unicode
V1.1 complies with the ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 standard.  I think
that the merger was one of the little-known success stories in the
information technology community.  Without the merger, computers would
have burned a bunch of cycles converting between Unicode and 10646.
The main point, thought, is that
although most of the Unicode V1.0 features were incorporated into
ISO/IEC 10646-1, it also included important features of earlier
draft versions of 10646 such as its ability to encode much more than
65,000 characters.  In fact, the Unicode Consortium's latest estimate
for the number of characters to be encoded is around 250,000 characters;
so the extra encoding space of 10646 is available.
Information about the Unicode Consortium may be obtained from
unicode-inc@unicode.org.
 
2.  You also stated, "Unicode specifies that strings be stored in their
natural order".  That is true, but you continue with "--for instance,
Hebrew from right to left, Latin languages from right to left."  The idea
is that character strings in all languages are stored in the same (natural)
order from the first character in the string to the last one.  However,
the rendering
processes that display and print the character string must decide
that strings of Hebrew characters are rendered from right to left on the
screen or on the paper, and that strings of Latin characters are rendered
from left to right.  In summary, storage of Unicode strings is from first
character to last, but rendering processes make the right-to-left and
left-to-right decisions based on the script.
 
Best regards,
Ed Hart
Chairman of the US X3L2 technical standards committee for codes and
character sets
Ú Edwin Hart          Andy Feibus         05/12/94 Comments on your article in A