CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unicodefontscharacter-encodingasciicodepages
MyNameIsUser
MyNameIsUser

Reputation: 139

Character Sets, Locales, Fonts and Code Pages?

I can't figure out the relation between those terms. I actually need a brief explanation for each and eventually a relation between them.

Moreover, where do all these stuff reside? Where are they implemented? Is it the job of the operating system to manage the aforementioned terms? If not, then who is responsible for this job?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 895

Answers (1)

Deduplicator
Deduplicator

Reputation: 45654

Character Sets describe the relationship between character codes and characters.
As an example, all (extended) ASCII character sets assign 41hex == 65dec to A.
Common character sets are ASCII, Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16), Latin-1 and Windows-1252.

Code Pages are a a representation of character sets / a mechanism for selecting which character set is in use: There are the old DOS/computer manufacturer codepages and the legacy support for them in Windows, ANSI-Codepage (ANSI is not to blame here) and OEM-Codepage.
If you have a choice, avoid them like the plague and go for unicode, preferably UTF-8, though UTF-16 is an acceptable choice for the OS-facing part in Windows.

Locales are collections of all the information needed to conform to local conventions for display of information. On systems which neither use code pages nor have a system-defined universal character set, they also determine the character set used (e.g. Unixoids).

Fonts are the graphics and ancillary information neccessary for displaying text of a known encoding. Examples are "Times New Roman", "Verdana", "Arial" and "WingDings".
Not all Fonts have symbols for all characters present in any specific character set.

Upvotes: 3

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