Character encoding

Have you ever wondered what goes on between the ‘A’ you hit on your keyboard, the ‘A’ stored in your file, and the ‘A’ that comes out of your printer? Why does that letter still come out of the printer if the file is printed by your friend in Egypt who doesn’t use the letter ‘A’? Maybe you know that ‘A’ is character 65 (decimal) in ASCII; if you put it on a web page, and it’s visited by someone in Japan, why don’t they get character number 65 in the Kanji alphabet? Do you remember the DOS days when your Mac owning colleague would send you a file and what were supposed to be accented characters would turn into smiley faces? Have you ever pasted text from MS-Word into Emacs, and Emacs wanted to save the document as UTF-8? Just what is that about? All this, and more, will be explained in this article.