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Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources

Character sets, alphabets

The subject of character sets, alphabets, glyphs, character encodings and notations, writing systems, etc., is a world unto itself, and I will not for one moment pretend to understand it more than superficially. Rather than make this guide any more pedantic than it already is, I've decided, in the immortal words of Drew Pearson, to "lie a little", and pretend that all these terms are sort of synonymous. Interested readers will find plenty of discussion of character set issues, and a good jumping place is Martin Ramsch's Latin-1 page. There are also quite a few books on the subject.