Unicode symbols

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In computing, in addition to encoding characters for the various writing systems used throughout the World, Unicode also devotes several blocks of characters to symbols that have a well-defined place in plain text. In Unicode there is a main distinction between "scripts" and "symbols". A character is either part of "script" or of a list of "symbols". Unicode's "Special characters", i.e. with Unicode a specified behaviour like in line-breaking, are also Symbols.

Many of the symbols are drawn from existing character sets or ISO or other national and international standards. As stated in the Unicode Standard 5.0^[1], “The universe of symbols is rich and open-ended.” This makes the issue of what symbols to encode and how symbols should be encoded more complicated than the issues surrounding alphabets, syllabaries, logographies, and other writing systems. Typically Unicode has sought to encode symbols that have clear roots in national and international standards. Similarly, it focuses on symbols that make sense in a one-dimensional plain text context. For example, Unicode cites the typical two-dimensional arrangement of electronic diagram symbols as the reason for not including those in the characters set ^[2]. Of course for adequate treatment in plain text, symbols must also be largely monochromatic. Even with these limitations—monochromatic, one-dimensional and standards based—the domain of symbols is potentially limitless. Unicode has primarily focused on writing systems, CJK ideographs, and numerals. Two recent symbol genre additions are the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (Unicode 3.1) and Yijing Hexagram Symbols (Unicode 4.0).

Symbol block list

The following Unicode ranges encode Symbols

• Alphanumeric variants (based on Latin characters in Unicode)
  • Superscripts and Subscripts (2070–209F)
  • Currency Symbols (20A0–20CF)
  • Letterlike Symbols (2100–214F)
  • Number Forms (2150–218F)
  • Enclosed Alphanumerics (2460–24FF)
  • Phonetic Symbols (including IPA))

• Arrows
  • Arrows (2190–21FF)
  • Supplemental Arrows-A (27F0–27FF)
  • Supplemental Arrows-B (2900–297F)
  • Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (2B00–2BFF)
  • Dingbat arrows (2794–27BF)

• Mathematical
  • Mathematical Operators (2200–22FF)
  • Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (27C0–27EF)
  • Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (2980–29FF)
  • Supplemental Mathematical Operators (2A00–2AFF)
  • Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (1D400–1D7FF)

• Technical
  • Miscellaneous Technical (2300–23FF)
  • Control Pictures (2400–243F)
  • Optical Character Recognition (2440–245F)

• Miscellaneous
  • Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (20D0–20FF)
  • Box Drawing (2500–257F)
  • Block Elements (2580–259F)
  • Geometric Shapes (25A0–25FF)
  • Miscellaneous Symbols (2600–26FF)
  • Dingbats (2700–27BF)
  • Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (2B00–2BFF)

See also

• Mapping of Unicode characters

Notes

1. ^ Chapter 12 (p295)
2. ^ Unicode Standard 5.0; Chapter 12 (p302)

References

• The Unicode Standard 5.0

External links

• Unicode character code charts
• Draft Unicode Technical Report #25: Unicode Support for Mathematics
• decodeunicode.org Unicode-Wiki with all 98,884 graphical Unicode 5.0 characters as GIF images in three sizes. Including full text search. English/German