Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers . Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard , Unicode consists of a character repertoire, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings , a set of code charts for visual reference, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case , a set of reference data computer files , and rules for normalization, decomposition, collation and rendering.