Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
In considering how text is converted from one encoding to another, it is useful to understand what constitutes coded character sets and character encoding schemes. To do so, it is helpful to have a set of terms that describe the discrete entities comprising a coded character set, a character encoding scheme, and their underlying concepts.
For a more complete treatment of these and other concepts such as packing schemes, multiple character sets, and code-switching schemes for multiple character sets, see Appendix B.