Unicode is an international industry standard used to encode written characters. It's a double byte universal character coding scheme that supports all modern day writing systems and has been accepted as an ISO standard. This standard makes it possible to encode all of the characters used for written languages throughout the world in one table.
Mac OS 8.5 better supports Unicode keyboard and text services with the following enhancements:
KeyCaps 8.0.2
- Modification of the Key Caps Application to Support Unicode Keyboard Layouts
Keyboard 8.1
- Provides support for a change to Font and Keyboard Script Synchronization. Keyboard Control Panel version 8.1 will also provide support for Unicode.
QuickDrawText/Font Manager
- Add anti-aliased (smooth) text
- Fixed bugs and thus improved stability
- Improve performance, especially for 2-byte fonts. 2-byte fonts are character fonts such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, and Arabic fonts.
- Moved WorldScript II patch into system to improve stability, performance, and memory requirements of 2-byte systems.
- Now possible to draw double-byte text without WorldScript II, so CJK systems work when booted with extensions off.
Text Services Manager 1.5
- Support for one-byte scripts used in emerging markets such as Thailand and India. Input methods for languages other than Japanese, Korean, and Chinese can now be added.
- Support for Unicode input including Unicode keyboard layouts and Unicode input methods. Enabling Unicode input support is a key requirement for ATSUI.
- Addition of event protocol support requested by AppleTech for the Kotoeri input method and by other developers. This protocol will pave the way for text services such as spell checkers, tokenizers and stemmers, which need to analyze words contextually.
- Integration of inline support, which is currently provided by a collection of software patches. This will improve reliability.
- These features will provide significant user experience improvements for the markets which require single-byte input methods and will add value specifically for publishing because it will support text entry in Thai, Indic languages, etc.
Apple Type Solution for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI)
- ATSUI is a new application programming interface (API) that lets applications draw Unicode text and provides advanced typography in a QuickDraw graphics environment. ATSUI will also provide DataFork Font Support.