There is a nice explanation in Java in a Nutshell, 2nd edition, by 
Flanagan.  Surely someone around UNC has it sitting on their shelf :-)

cheers and good luck!

bruce

Bijan Parsia <bparsia at email.unc.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
> 
> > While around the topic of exotic characters, note that FreeType (but not my
> > Squeak code) supports all the various character encodings of truetype, like
> > Mac, Win, and Unicode.
> [snip]
> > Just write a method or two in Squeak for mapping the characters (I can show
> > what methods to write but don't know Unicode or character encodings in
> > general) and you could put all these characters in a bitmap font and use
> [snip]
> 
> Cool, quick question (for anyone). I'm trying to port the (newly open
> sourced) VisualWorks XML parser (it validates!). Being able to decode
> UTC-8 (?) or whatever would be a good start (I think! I don't  know much
> about this).
> 
> Anyone have some insight to offer? (About anything. Wait, scratch that.)
> 
> VW has a StreamWrappingEncoder (or some such) which, from what I can
> remember, maps the stream to the internal form. Someone want to whip me up
> one for Unicode?
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan Parsia.