Unicode is a
computing industry standard for the consistent
encoding, representation, and handling of
text expressed in most of the world's
writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the
Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) standard and published as
The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more than 120,000
characters covering 129 modern and historic
scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets. The standard consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and set of standard
character encodings, a set of reference
data files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for
normalization, decomposition,
collation, rendering, and
bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as
Arabic and
Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts). , the most recent version is
Unicode 8.0. The standard is maintained by the
Unicode Consortium.