Multicode: a truly multilingual approach to text encoding

Author

Mudawwar, Muhammad F.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., American Univ., Cairo, Egypt

Volume

30

Issue

4

fYear

1997

fDate

4/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

37

Lastpage

43

Abstract

Unicode was designed to extend ASCII for encoding text in different languages, but it still has several important drawbacks. Multicode addresses many of Unicode´s drawbacks and should have considerable appeal to programmers who work with text in a variety of languages. Its future, however, depends on the computer industry´s acceptance. Multicode can represent Unicode files because it reserves a character set for Unicode. Converting Multicode to Unicode is also straightforward (although the opposite is not). Thus, both approaches can coexist-Multicode for programming ease and Unicode to support unified fonts

Keywords

DP industry; character sets; code standards; variable length codes; ASCII; Multicode; Unicode file representation; code conversion; computer industry acceptance; future; multilingual approach; programming ease; reserved character set; text encoding; unified fonts; Code standards; Computer industry; Encoding; Explosives; ISO standards; Internet; Natural languages; Operating systems; Standards development; Standards organizations;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computer

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9162

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/2.585152

Filename

585152