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Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of the standard defines 154998 characters and 168 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts.
In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, or as a dinkus. Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane, and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16. The code points in these areas cannot be considered as standardized characters in Unicode itself. They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may define their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Consortium assignments. Under the Unicode Stability Policy, the Private Use Areas will remain allocated for that purpose in all future Unicode versions.
Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF.
Miscellaneous Technical is a Unicode block ranging from U+2300 to U+23FF. It contains various common symbols which are related to and used in the various technical, programming language, and academic professions. For example:
Over a thousand characters from the Latin script are encoded in the Unicode Standard, grouped in several basic and extended Latin blocks. The extended ranges contain mainly precomposed letters plus diacritics that are equivalently encoded with combining diacritics, as well as some ligatures and distinct letters, used for example in the orthographies of various African languages and the Vietnamese alphabet. Latin Extended-C contains additions for Uighur and the Claudian letters. Latin Extended-D comprises characters that are mostly of interest to medievalists. Latin Extended-E mostly comprises characters used for German dialectology (Teuthonista). Latin Extended-F and -G contain characters for phonetic transcription.
Block Elements is a Unicode block containing square block symbols of various fill and shading. Used along with block elements are box-drawing characters, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters. These can be used for filling regions of the screen and portraying drop shadows. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Blocks.
Specials is a short Unicode block of characters allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0:
The Basic Latin Unicode block, sometimes informally called C0 Controls and Basic Latin, is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ranges from U+0000 to U+007F, contains 128 characters and includes the C0 controls, ASCII punctuation and symbols, ASCII digits, both the uppercase and lowercase of the English alphabet and a control character.
The Latin-1 Supplement is the second Unicode block in the Unicode standard. It encodes the upper range of ISO 8859-1: 80 (U+0080) - FF (U+00FF). C1 Controls (0080–009F) are not graphic. This block ranges from U+0080 to U+00FF, contains 128 characters and includes the C1 controls, Latin-1 punctuation and symbols, 30 pairs of majuscule and minuscule accented Latin characters and 2 mathematical operators.
Latin Extended-A is a Unicode block and is the third block of the Unicode standard. It encodes Latin letters from the Latin ISO character sets other than Latin-1 and also legacy characters from the ISO 6937 standard.
Latin Extended-B is the fourth block (0180-024F) of the Unicode Standard. It has been included since version 1.0, where it was only allocated to the code points 0180-01FF and contained 113 characters. During unification with ISO 10646 for version 1.1, the block range was extended by 80 code points and another 35 characters were assigned. In version 3.0 and later, the last 60 available code points in the block were assigned. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Extended Latin.
IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs and non-IPA phonetic letters. Additional characters employed for phonetics, like the palatalization sign, are encoded in the blocks Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F) and Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80–1DBF). Diacritics are found in the Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0–02FF) and Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F) blocks. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Standard Phonetic.
The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.
Arabic Presentation Forms-B is a Unicode block encoding spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and contextual letter forms. The special codepoint ZWNBSP is also here, which is only meant for a byte order mark. The block name in Unicode 1.0 was Basic Glyphs for Arabic Language; its characters were re-ordered in the process of merging with ISO 10646 in Unicode 1.0.1 and 1.1.
Kangxi Radicals is a Unicode block. In version 3.0 (1999), this separate Kangxi Radicals block was introduced which encodes the 214 radicals in sequence, at U+2F00–2FD5. These are specific code points intended to represent the radical qua radical, as opposed to the character consisting of the unaugmented radical; thus, U+2F00 represents radical 1 while U+4E00 represents the character yī meaning "one". In addition, the CJK Radicals Supplement block (2E80–2EFF) was introduced, encoding alternative forms taken by Kangxi radicals as they appear within specific characters. For example, ⺁ "CJK RADICAL CLIFF" (U+2E81) is a variant of ⼚ radical 27 (U+2F1A), itself identical in shape to the character consisting of unaugmented radical 27, 厂 "cliff" (U+5382).
Kanbun is a Unicode block containing annotation characters used in Japanese copies (kanbun) of Classical Chinese texts, to indicate reading order.
Box Drawing is a Unicode block containing characters for compatibility with legacy graphics standards that contained characters for making bordered charts and tables, i.e. box-drawing characters. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Form and Chart Components.
Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls is a Unicode block containing formatting characters that enable full formatting of quadrats for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Small Kana Extension is a Unicode block containing additional small variants for the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, in addition to those in the Hiragana, Katakana and Katakana Phonetic Extensions blocks.
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
- ↑ "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium.