The most recent versions of all the major operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux/Unix support Unicode. Top of Page Which Operating Systems Support Unicode? Each By Language page will specify which older encodings need to be supported for each language. Therefore, it may be necessary to have fonts and utilities which support both Unicode utilities and older encodings. In addition, there were vendor-specific differences making data exchange more complicated.īecause Unicode was developed starting in the 1990s, many older Web sites and data files are written in older encoding systems.
Before that operating systems implemented a series of encodings which supported one or two scripts. Unicode was not developed until the late 1990s. Systems which recognize Unicode can consistently read and process data from many languages.ĭevelopers may want to view the Encoding Tutorial to see how encodings are structured and how that affects multilingual computing. Unlike older systems, Unicode allows multiple writing systems to co-exist in one data file. Unicode, also known as UTF-8 or the "Universal Alphabet" is aĪn ordered set of over a million characters covering the majority of writing Operating systems include programs and fonts which convert these numbers to letters visible on the screen and computer monitor. An encoding system, such as ASCII, assigns a number to each letter, number or character. What is Unicode Encoding? About Unicode EncodingĬomputers store data as numbers, even textual data. How do I view Unicode Web Sites and Documents?.