Encodings, Part 1

What are you reading right now? Letters? Words? Ideas? There really is no wrong answer, unless you happen to be a computer.

If you're a computer, you're reading numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. Everything in computers is numbers, and text is no exception.

How do those numbers turn into text? It all starts out with a font. A font, basically, is a group of small pictures, pictures representing how to draw each character. In the computer, a character is stored as the index to a specific character in the font, or, in other words, which character should be drawn.

Okay, so where do encodings come in, and what are they exactly?

Computers began in the English-speaking world. Apple and Microsoft, the two big players in the computer world, are both American companies. Like a lot of companies that start out in the United States, they didn't really think globally at first. A character was represented by small numbers that would fit within one byte (Computers those days weren't really able to handle anything bigger anyway). One byte can handle the numbers from 0 to 255. That's more than enough for all characters in English ('A' and 'a' being two different characters, etc.), but not nearly enough for some other languages, like, say, Japanese.

This is where things got complicated. And I'll pick it up from here next week.