Font encodings

A font encoding is a function that maps a number to a specific character in a set, and thus describes how the characters are ordered. Perhaps the most familiar encoding used by computers is the 7-bit ASCII code, encoding the Roman alphabet, plus some punctuation and special characters. This falls far short of the requirement for accented characters even in European languages, and thus the 8-bit ISO Latin-1 encoding, backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII, was developed. With the spread of computers worldwide, companies like IBM and Microsoft defined their own encodings for non-English languages. Early attempts at standardizing encodings for Indian languages resulted in 8-bit ISCII [11]. As ISCII's support for some languages such as Tamil and Kannada was inadequate, it has since been supplanted by other encodings.

This plethora of encodings led to difficulties in interoperability of computers, as a result of which the 16-bit Unicode (ISO 10646) standard [12] was created to cover every character in all languages used anywhere in the world.