Unicode is an international standard for encoding characters, signs, and symbols used in digital devices worldwide.

Developed by the Unicode Consortium—a non-profit organisation with international members—Unicode assigns a unique code (or code point) to each character of as many written languages as possible. More characters and/or more scripts are added almost every year, presented to the organisation members, who research and discuss thoroughly about the relevance of adding them to the Unicode standard. These codes are used by digital systems to ensure consistent and stable exchange of texts across platforms and devices.

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In font files, Unicode code points are mapped to glyphs through the cmap table (Character to Glyph Mapping). This allows software to know which glyph to display for a given character code. Not all glyphs in a font must be assigned with a Unicode code point; some may exist only for stylistic or contextual substitution purposes.