Students and Educators

Students and educators in the fields of computer science, typography, linguistics, and the humanities all can benefit from Unicode-encoded character data and algorithms. Links to many resources for tutorial material, case studies, references, and book lists are provided in the navigation elements of this web page.

Computer Science and Mathematics. Computer science students learn that Unicode is an integral part of string handling, when learning programming languages, such as Java, Perl, or C. Enabling software to provide support for the world’s languages requires special algorithms to determine how to select words and sentences, wrap text appropriately, and search effectively. The Unicode Consortium supplies these algorithms and the data needed for their implementation.

The study of advanced mathematics at universities is fully supported by the many mathematical alphabets, operators, and symbols encoded in Unicode. The American Mathematical Society has been an active partner with the Unicode Consortium in ensuring that mathematicians and mathematical publishing interests have the characters and symbols needed by current mathematics teachers and researchers.

Typography and Font Design. For those studying or working in the fields of typography and font design, an understanding of Unicode is crucial to the design of appropriate fonts and interfaces for our multilingual world.  With standard encoding models used for complex writing systems, such as for  the languages of South Asia and the Middle East, font designers can more easily extend their font families to include additional language support.

Languages and Linguistics. Linguistic researchers and students will find their work with languages enhanced, thanks to the continuing addition of many minority and lesser used scripts.  For example, characters are being added regularly to extend support for the languages of Africa and Asia. Arabic, Cyrillic, Tiffinagh, Ethiopic are being extended as necessary. Javanese, Balinese, and minority language support throughout South and South East Asia have been added to the Unicode Standard.

Linguistic researchers and students are in an excellent position to contribute to the development of Unicode CLDR locale data.

Humanities. Scholars and students of the humanities will find that Unicode has support for many ancient manuscript traditions, including medieval Latin and ancient Greek. Cuneiform writing and many runic traditions are also supported, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Old Italic, and South Asian scripts of the ancient Silk Road. Many more are under consideration.

Reduced Membership Rates. The Unicode Consortium offers reduced membership rates for students and for educational institutions. Students can join the Unicode Consortium to have full access to documentation, email lists and technical meetings and learn about the development process of the Unicode Standard and other Unicode technical publications. A valid student ID is required to join at this level.

Educational institutions are offered two categories of reduced membership rates: institutional membership and associate membership. The institutional level of membership allows educational institutions to contribute effectively to the technical work of the Consortium. Institutional members have full access to documentation, email lists and technical committee meetings and receive one vote in all technical committees. The associate level of membership allows the same privileges without voting rights.