Chapter 1: How the world writes

Every language has its own writing system. Many languages in Europe and elsewhere are written in the Latin alphabet but each language has adapted it to its own requirements. Further afield, the world teems with languages written in completely different alphabets and writing systems. Inside the computer, however, every piece of text is stored as a sequence of numbers. In this chapter, we will look at the methods that have been developed throughout the IT industry's evolution to convert text in various languages into numbers and back, and how these methods work (or do not work) for specific languages.