As Paul is implementing unicode support into FireFly4, I thought this open source project website might be of interest to other forum members here.
http://site.icu-project.org/ (http://site.icu-project.org/)
QuoteICU is a cross-platform Unicode based globalization library. It includes support for locale-sensitive string comparison, date/time/number/currency/message formatting, text boundary detection, character set conversion and so on.
There are a number of unicode overviews and documents which you might find useful even if you don't want to use the library itself.