This tutorial will allude to the Unicode Standard in various places, since approaches that use the Unicode character set typically make life much easier for the developer and content author.

You do not need a high level of familiarity with Unicode to benefit from this tutorial. The rest of this subsection will provide you with basic information about it.

Unicode is a universal character set, ie. a standard that defines, in one place, all the characters needed for writing the majority of living languages in use on computers. It aims to be, and to a large extent already is, a superset of all other character sets that have been encoded.