Multicode: a truly multilingual approach to text encoding
Muhamed F. Mudawar · Computer · 1997
Unicode was designed to extend ASCII for encoding text in different languages, but it still has several important drawbacks. Multicode addresses many of Unicode's drawbacks and should have considerable appeal to programmers who work with text in a variety of languages. Its future, however, depends on the computer industry's acceptance. Multicode can represent Unicode files because it reserves a character set for Unicode. Converting Multicode to Unicode is also straightforward (although the opposite is not). Thus, both approaches can coexist-Multicode for programming ease and Unicode to support unified fonts.