To handle a text in a computer, programs need to know how the text is encoded. In its processing, the software sees only a long string of numbers, and these have to match up with what you and I can recognise as "characters". For many languages like English with a restricted alphabet, encoding can be managed with only 1 "byte" per character. On the other hand a language like Chinese, which draws upon a very large array of characters, cannot easily be fitted to a 1-byte system. Hence the creation of other "multi-byte" systems. Obviously if a text in English is encoded in a multi-byte way, it will make a bigger file than one encoded with 1 byte per character, and this is slightly wasteful of disk and memory space. So, at the time of writing, 1-byte character sets are still in very widespread use. is a name for a multi-byte method, widely used for Chinese, etc.
In practice, your texts are likely to be encoded in a Windows 1-byte system, older texts in a DOS 1-byte system, and newer ones, especially in Chinese, Japanese, Greek, in Unicode. What matters most to you is what each character looks like, but WordSmith cannot possibly sort words correctly, or even recognise where a word begins and ends, if the encoding is not correct. WordSmith has to know (or try to find out) which system your texts are encoded in. It can perform certain tests in the background. But as it doesn't actually understand the words it sees, it is much safer for you to convert to Unicode, especially if you process texts in German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Polish, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic etc.
Three main kinds of character set, each with its own flavours, are , , and .
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