The Unicode Consortium (Unicode Inc.) is a non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard. Its stated goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, claiming that many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, and modern operating systems.

The organization was founded to develop, extend, and promote the use of the Unicode Standard. It cooperates with many standards development organizations, including ISO/IEC JTC1, W3C, IETF, and ECMA.

[edit] Books by The Unicode Consortium

• The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0 (5th edition ed.). Addison-Wesley. October 2006. ISBN 978-0-321-48091-0. 
• The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0. Addison-Wesley. August 2003. ISBN 978-0-321-18578-5. 

[edit] See also

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Unicode/Character_reference

• Comparison of Unicode encodings
• Free software Unicode fonts
• Mapping of Unicode characters
• Universal Character Set

[edit] External links

• The Unicode Consortium