Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing (usually using Latin characters and the local script), but not multilingual computer processing (computer processing of mixed arbitrary scripts). Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings, such as those defined by the ISO/IEC 8859 standard, which find wide usage in various countries of the world but remain largely incompatible with each other.

The most common encodings are the ASCII-compatible UTF-8, the ASCII-incompatible UTF-16 (compatible with the obsolete UCS-2), and the Chinese Unicode encoding standard GB18030 which is not part of The Unicode Standard but is used in China and implements Unicode fully. The Unicode Standard defines three encodings but several others exist, mostly variable-length encodings. Unicode can be stored using several different encodings, which translate the character codes into sequences of bytes. The Standard also includes reference data files and visual charts to help developers and designers correctly implement the repertoire. Alongside the character encodings, the Consortium's official publication includes a wide variety of details about the scripts and how to display them: normalization rules, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional text display order for multilingual texts, and so on. The Unicode Standard, however, includes more than just the base code. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, each being code-for-code identical to the other.

The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, JSON, and most modern programming languages, sometimes only in UTF-8 form. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, thousands of emoji (including in colors), and non-visual control and formatting codes.

Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols. This article contains uncommon Unicode characters.

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