Article ID: CBB658671561

Text Standards for the “Rest of World”: The Making of the Unicode Standard and the OpenType Format (2024)

unapi

This article traces the development of the set of technologies that enabled multilingual digital written communication, focusing on the Unicode Standard, the bottom layer of what becomes “text stack,” and the OpenType Format (OTF), an important technical layer that augments the Unicode Standard. Though it had a critical role in making non-Latin writing systems usable on computers, popular accounts of OTF only situate it as the solution to the 1980s’ industry “font wars”—infighting between computer companies to establish a technically superior technology for Latin typesetting. Instead, it is positioned here as an advancement in software internationalization. While this article considers the possibilities for multilingual text writ large, it focuses most on the family of Indic scripts. We see how Indic scripts were initially handled by Unicode—in secondary layers and with naïveté—ultimately producing a complex, under-specified system.

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Authors & Contributors
Alberts, Gerard
Banga, Rashmi
Cassier, Maurice
Epstein, Bob
Gooday, Graeme J. N.
Grad, Burton
Journals
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Business and Economic History On-Line
Contemporary European History
History of Technology
Science Technology and Society
Publishers
New York University
LIT Verlag
MIT Press
Concepts
Software
Computers and computing
Computer industry
Standards and standardization
Business and commerce
Communication technology
People
Grad, Burton
Johnson, Luanne
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
India
Tunisia
California (U.S.)
Europe
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
American Telephone and Telegraph Company
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