Ken Irwin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for a good source to help me understand character sets and how to use them. I pretty much know nothing about this - the whole world of Unicode, ASCII, octal, UTF-8, etc. is baffling to me.

Other people have recommended a whole lot of fabulous resources, so I 
won't cover ground they already have.

If, however, you need to deal with characters which don't qualify for 
inclusion in Unicode (or which do qualify but which haven't yet been 
assigned code points). I recommend tei:glyph:

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-glyph.html

We use this to represent typographically interesting but short-lived 
approaches to the representation of Māori in printed works. See for 
example the 'wh' ligature (which looks like a 'vh' and is pronounced in 
modern usage like 'f') in the following text:

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Auc1911NgaM-t1-body-d4.html

for the underlying TEI XML representation see:

http://www.nzetc.org/tei-source/Auc1911NgaM.xml

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository