Unicode Standard and Macromedia Flash

The Unicode Standard, developed by the Unicode Consortium, is a universal character encoding standard used for representation of text for computer processing. The current version (3.1) of the Unicode Standard assigns a unique identifier to each of 94,140 characters, covering the scripts of the world's principal written languages, as well as many mathematical symbols and other characters.

The Unicode Standard helps computers to display non-Latin based characters, such as Cyrillic or Chinese. The unique identifier for a character is used by the input (keyboard) program, the computer operating system, the word processing program and the font to display the character on the computer screen.

Not all software applications or fonts are Unicode enabled. When the text processing application has not been configured to understand or recognize a Unicode identifier presented to it (by someone pressing a key on a keyboard set to present the identifier), then the computer screen will not display the character. Instead of the character, the computer screen will perhaps display the wrong text, a question mark or a square box instead.

Macromedia Flash Player 6 is the first Player version to support the Unicode standard. For more information see the Using Flash manual or (Help > Using Flash). To view the Unicode text correctly, the end-user must have the Macromedia Flash Player 6 installed.

Unfortunately, previous versions of Flash (5 and below) do not support the Unicode Standard. The characters of non-Latin, Unicode fonts will not display correctly in the Flash Players previous to version 6.

Additional information

For details on supported fonts in Flash, review What types of fonts can be used with Flash (TechNote 4105).

For more information on the Unicode Standard, see:

	The Unicode Home Page
	What is Unicode?

Last updated:	March 20, 2002
Keywords:	Unicode Standard, fonts, text, display
Created:	May 18, 2001