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The Advantages of Unicode Standard Compliant Geez Data Processing

 

Although very late, since the Geez script is now part of the Unicode standard, many professional believe that Geez-based data processing has entered a new era. But, many users are not still well aware of the advantages of conforming to the Unicode standard. In the following few paragraphs, we will try to briefly highlight the major advantages of developing and using standard-compliant Geez applications.

 

First and foremost, the problem of document incompatibility will go for good. Now the difference between different Unicode standard compliant fonts is just a difference of style only, much the same as "Arial" and "Times New Roman". Except the difference between the style, you can read any document created using one Unicode Geez font even if what you have in your PC is a different Unicode font. If we imagine the current document incompatibility problems among the various currently available non-standard Geez fonts, this is a great achievement. In the coming years, we expect many people and companies will produce Unicode fonts. For example, Microsoft now distributes Unicode fonts with its products that contain scripts of many countries. Since the Geez script was very late to join the Unicode standard, it is not yet included in most of the Unicode fonts. But, considering the current trend it will be included in the future fonts for sure.

Currently, most characters in the non-standard fonts are actually made up of two characters. For example, the character "z¤" in the word "z¤Â" is made up of "z" and " ¤". You might have already noticed this in most newspapers and TV Screens. On the Unicode standard, each character is created as a self-standing character. The standard has assigned enough space for most of the Geez characters (code point 4608 - 4991 ). Thus the quality of documents created using Unicode fonts will be far better than what we see now on newspapers and TV Screens, as there is no need now to use "extensions - Q_à " to form the characters.

 

Developing Unicode-based Geez applications will now be fairly easy and dependable. For Windows developers, Microsoft has decided to make all its products, including the development products, Unicode-compliant. With a fair amount of effort, developers can now develop Unicode based Geez applications that fully support sorting, searching and indexing.

 About the Unicode Consortium (www.unicode.org)

The Unicode Consortium was formed in 1991, when the efforts of the ISO-10646 Wide Character Standard, and the efforts of Microsoft and other big IT companies to define a Universal Wide Character Code Page, were merged.

In the Unicode standard, each character is defined using 2-bytes. Thus one Unicode font can define up to 65,536 characters. The standard defines the range of characters that can be defined for each script. For example, the code point 0-255 is set aside for  basic Latin, the rage 880-1023 is set aside for the Greek script,  the code point 4608-4991 to the Geez script, and so on.