CSA Preface

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

Scope

This International Standard specifies the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS). It is applicable to the representation, transmission, interchange, processing, storage, input, and presentation of the written form of the languages of the world as well as of additional symbols.

This International Standard

- specifies the architecture of this International Standard

- defines terms used in this International Standard

- describes the general structure of the UCS codespace

- specifies the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of the UCS

- specifies supplementary planes of the UCS: the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), the Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP), the Tertiary Ideographic Plane (TIP), and the Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (SSP)

- defines a set of graphic characters used in scripts and the written form of languages on a world-wide scale

- specifies the names for the graphic characters and format characters of the BMP, SMP, SIP, TIP, SSP and their coded representations within the UCS codespace

- specifies the coded representations for control characters and private use characters

- specifies three encoding forms of the UCS: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32

- specifies seven encoding schemes of the UCS: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, and UTF-32LE

- specifies the management of future additions to this coded character set.

The UCS is an encoding system different from that specified in ISO/IEC 2022. The method to designate UCS from ISO/IEC 2022 is specified in 12.2.

A graphic character will be assigned only one code point in the standard, located either in the BMP or in one of the supplementary planes.