The Unicode Tutorial is a 4hr introduction to the contents, the concepts, the principles and the architecture of the Unicode Standard. Where appropriate the motivation behind particular design choices in the Unicode Standard is indicated. Significant extensions to the Unicode standard are under development and the tutorial will provide some advance information. The tutorial discusses further how Unicode addresses core requirements of implementations for a variety of scripts as well as the requirements to coexist in legacy environments. The tutorial is intended for general and technical audiences.

After completing the tutorial, participants will have a solid grounding in the concepts, and will be ready for detail-oriented presentations during the rest of the conference, or further self-study using the Unicode Standard, Version 3.1.