. The Unicode Standard Version 14.0 – Core Specification. The Unicode Consortium. Mountain, Unicode Inc., 2021.

The Unicode Standard and its associated specifications provide programmers with a single universal character encoding, extensive descriptions, and a vast amount of data about how characters function. The specifications and data describe how to form words and break lines; how to sort text in different languages; how to format numbers, dates, times, and other elements appropriate to different languages; how to display languages whose written form flows from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, or whose written form splits, combines, and reorders, such as languages of South Asia. These specifications include descriptions of how to deal with security concerns regarding the many "look-alike" characters from alphabets around the world. Without the properties and algorithms in the Unicode Standard and its associated specifications, interoperability between different implementations would be impossible, and much of the vast breadth of the world's languages would lie outside the reach of modern software.