Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile

That tripped me up too. The Unicode Core spec is quite good at explaining things and introduces some terminology you don't really hear outside the document. Chapter 2, General Structure , is worth reading in its entirety. I've linked some bits that might help: > *2.2.3 Characters, Not Glyphs* > The Unicode Standard draws a distinction between characters and glyphs. Characters are the abstract representations of the smallest components of written language that have semantic value. They represent primarily, but not exclusively, the letters, punctuation, and other signs that constitute natural language text and technical notation. [...] Letters in different scripts, even when they correspond either semantically or graphically, are represented in Unicode by distinct characters. > Characters are represented by code points that reside only in a memory representation, as strings in memory, on disk, or in data transmission. The Unicode Standard deals only with character codes. > *2.4 Code Points and Characters* > The range of integers used to code the abstract characters is called the codespace. A particular integer in this set is called a code point. When an abstract character is mapped or assigned to a particular code point in the codespace, it is then referred to as an encoded character. > *2.5 Encoding Forms* This deals with UTF-{8,16,32}, which is a tricky bit and tripped me up for a long time. If the document is too dense here, there's a lot of supplementary material online exp