Unicode is one of a millions ways of assigning a numeric value to each letter.

ASCII was the one of the first, but it is limited to 128 values and thus had no room for anything but the basic Roman alphabet, numbers, punctuation and a number of extra values used to make printing terminals go bing.

A little while later it became commont to use 256 values to to represent letters, allowing accented characters and a few things like dashes to be included. Sadly, Apple and Microsoft invented two different sets of values for the same characters. Also, many different countries had different sets. For example, the set for Mac in Hungary isn't the same as the set in the United States.

Unicode was invented to be universal, comprehensive assignment of values to letters. It was initially 65,536 values, but has since expanded to a much larger set. It can express the letter from every language you can imagine, including Klingon. It's the default for most text files on the Mac.

There are about a million more details to how Unicode works that might effect typesetting, but I'm afraid descrinbing them would make your head hurt. Is there something specific you need to know or do?

World alphabets covered by the Unicode standard: [link]

So a Word document has the option of being saved as Unicode?

If you're saving it as a .doc file, then no. But your tools that read .doc files ought to be able to make sure that all the characters are encoded properly.

And by "tools that read .doc files," you mean....? Layout programs like InDesign and Quark?

World alphabets covered by the Unicode standard:

Since Klingon is included, maybe you should say, "Galactic alphabets coverd by..."?

In theory, yes.

Actually, Klingon was submitted to the Unicode standards committee, but it was rejected. It will probably be resubmitted at some point.

Actually, Klingon was submitted to the Unicode standards committee, but it was rejected. It will probably be resubmitted at some point.

Heh.

Now I wanna know the story behind the submission, the rejection and the plans for resubmission.

I don't know why I want to know this....

[link]

In 1997 Michael Everson made a proposal to encode the characters of the fictional Klingon language in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2. The Unicode Consortium rejected this proposal in 2001 as "inappropriate for encoding" — not because of any technical inadequacy, but because users of Klingon normally read, write and exchange data in Latin transliteration. Now that some enthusiasts are blogging in tlhIngan piQad using newly available fonts and keyboard layouts, the possibility of reapplying to ISO has been raised.

Proposals suggested the inclusion of the elvish scripts Tengwar and Cirth from J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth setting in Plane 1 in 1993. The Consortium withdrew the draft to incorporate changes suggested by Tolkienists, and as of 2005 it remains under consideration.

It's hard to say how well the Word to Quark or Word to Indesign import will work without trying it. It could be very dependent on the exact versions of all of the software and the options used for saving the Word documents.

In this context I fear Unicode is being used somewhat as a buzz-word.

In this context I fear Unicode is being used somewhat as a buzz-word.

Or an excuse bandied about by one vendor so they can blame another vendor as to why their products won't interoperate.