What are character sets?

A character that appears on your computer screen, whether it's a number, a letter, or a symbol, is the graphical interpretation of a number. For a computer to know what characters to display, it refers to a database that associates a single character with each number. This database is called a character set.

Not all computers agree about what number applies to what character, so two users with incompatible character sets will have difficulty sharing information. For plain text messages written in English, this rarely happens, but for more complex documents such as those using extended characters, especially non-European characters, it is a major concern.

For more about character sets, see the tutorial on character code issues maintained by Jukka Korpela.

Also see:

• On my Windows computer, how can I display Chinese characters?
• Foreign language word processing at IUB
• In Windows, how can I view web pages in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, or other non-Roman alphabets, or that include foreign language characters?
• Character set comparison chart
• What are the ISO 8859 character sets and how do they compare?
• What are the differences between ASCII, ISO 8859, and Unicode?
• In Windows, how can I access extended keyboard characters, such as accent marks?
• In the Windows STCs, how do I change my keyboard settings to Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?
• In Mac OS X, how can I type foreign language characters?