Summary
This chapter talked about characters and what kinds of “characters” they can be. We covered the history of encoding, starting with ASCII’s use of code pages and how that was fraught with danger. From there we moved to encoding and working with code points for characters and what can happen to a character if the wrong encoding is used. Hopefully, that discussion “scared you straight” so that you’ll use Unicode code points and use them often. From there, we talked about different ways Unicode handles characters, including combining, precomposed, surrogate, and duplicate. Glyphs, ligatures, and fonts wrapped up the chapter when we covered how they affect the display of the character.