In the TeX world, the name of Cork is associated with a standardization effort dating back to 1990, the Cork font encoding, which can be used for most European languages written in the Latin script. At about the same time, though, a much wider standardization effort was initiated, as the Unicode Consortium was created to devise a universal character set suitable for any language and writing system. Of course, it wasn’t long before people felt the need to support Unicode in TeX–like systems. How far are we today? The latest extensions to the TeX engine are all labelled as “supporting Unicode”, but upon closer inspection this reveals rather imprecise: does it mean enabling UTF–8 input, handling multibyte characters, or implementing all the Unicode character properties and algorithms?