Java: Unicode

Unicode is a system of encoding characters. All characters and Strings in Java use the Unicode encoding, which allows truly international programming.

About Unicode

Unicode characters are 16 bits, 2 bytes.
Most programming languages before Java (C/C++, Pascal, Basic, ...) use an 8-bit encoding of ASCII (American Standard Coding for Information Interchange). ASCII only defines the first 128 characters, and the other 128 values are often used for various extensions.
There are 65,567 possible characters in Unicode. About 50,000 of them have already been assigned in Unicode version 3.0.
All of the world's major human languages can be represented in Unicode (including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean).
The first 64 characters of Unicode have the same values as the equivalent ASCII characters, and the first 128 characters are the same as ISO-8895-1 Latin-1.
You can learn more about Unicode (currently version 3.0) at www.unicode.org.

Unicode Fonts

Altho Java stores characters as Unicode, there are still some very practical operating system problems in entering or displaying many of the Unicode characters. Most fonts only display a very small subset of all Unicode characters, typically only about 100 different characters.

You can download the Lucida Sans Unicode font from Microsoft that has most of the Unicode characters. This is not a small file of course. [Need to add URL and size].