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<H2><A NAME="sec-unicode"></A> <A NAME="s4">4.</A> <A HREF="lct.html#toc4">What is Unicode</A></H2>

Traditionnaly, character encodings use 8 bits, and thus are limited to 256
characters. This causes problems because:
<OL>
<LI> it's not enough for some languages;</LI>
<LI> people speaking languages using different encodings have to
choose which one they use, and have to switch the system's state when
changing the language, which makes it difficult to mix several languages in
the same file;</LI>
<LI> etc...</LI>
</OL>

Thus the UCS (Universal Character Set), also know as Unicode was
created to handle and mix all of our world's scripts. This is a
32-bit (4 bytes) encoding, otherwise known as UCS4 because of the size
of its characters, which is normalised by ISO as the 10646-1 standard.
The most widely used characters from UCS are contained in the UCS2
16-bit subset of UCS; this is the subset used by the Linux console.
For convenience, the UTF8 encoding was designed as a variable-length
encoding (with 8 bytes of maximum length) with ASCII compatibility;
all chars that have a UCS4 encoding can be expressed as a UTF8
sesquence, and vice-versa.

<A HREF="http://unicode.org">The Unicode consortium</A> defines
additional properties for UCS2 characters.
See: <CODE>unicode(7)</CODE>, <CODE>utf-8(7)</CODE>.

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