OT-Lay explanations of Unicode

[Sivakatirswami]

For the back cover "Digital Dharma" page of the next issue of our 
international magazine, Hinduism Today, I'm writing a 1/3 page article 
on Unicode with a focus on fonts, now that Tiger has added Tamil to 
their list of supported Unicode languages.

I need  as non-geeky an explanation as I can get without dumbing it 
down so far that the information is useless.

Added boon: This might even help me me figure out what is going on 
inside Revolution with Unicode, and possibly resolve some of the 
mysteries (read "headaches") we're having moving text from InDesign to 
raw ascii- - XML to BBEdit, to Revolution  and back again...

OF course, I will dig the web myself, but if any of you unicode wizards 
can supply me (offlist) with URLs,  a layperson's description or a 
reference, I would very much appreciate it.  even a few one-5 liner 
metaphoric descriptions to help visualize it could be useful.

"UTF-8" and "UTF-16" means something like "Unidentified Torch 
Flowers--8 of them..." to me today ... but I hope to correct this 
understanding shortly. (smile)

Best from Hawaii,

Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org