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Unicode is a information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of March 2020 the most recent version, Unicode 13.0, contains a repertoire of 143,924 characters covering 154 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.
The Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode (SCSU) is a Unicode Technical Standard for reducing the number of bytes needed to represent Unicode text, especially if that text uses mostly characters from one or a small number of per-language character blocks. It does so by dynamically mapping values in the range 128–255 to offsets within particular blocks of 128 characters. The initial conditions of the encoder mean that existing strings in ASCII and ISO-8859-1 that do not contain C0 control codes other than NULL TAB CR and LF can be treated as SCSU strings. Since most alphabets do reside in blocks of contiguous Unicode codepoints, texts that use small alphabets and either ASCII punctuation or punctuation that fits within the window for the main alphabet can be encoded at one byte per character, most other punctuation can be encoded at 2 bytes per symbol through non-locking shifts. SCSU can also switch to UTF-16 internally to handle non-alphabetic languages.
Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0-25FF.
Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character "Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actually separates characters that would otherwise be considered a single grapheme in a given context.
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.
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. In the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode 12.0, Unicode defines a total of 87,887 CJK Unified Ideographs.
The Unicode Standard assigns character properties to each code point. These properties can be used to handle "characters" in processes, like in line-breaking, script direction right-to-left or applying controls. Slightly inconsequently, some "character properties" are also defined for code points that have no character assigned, and code points that are labeled like "<not a character>". The character properties are described in Standard Annex #44.
CJK Compatibility is a Unicode block containing square symbols encoded for compatibility with east Asian character sets.
Manichaean is a Unicode block containing characters historically used for writing Sogdian, Parthian, and the dialects of Fars.
Tirhuta is a Unicode block containing characters for Brahmi-derived Tirhuta script which was the primary writing system for Maithili in Bihar, India and Madhesh, Nepal until the 20th century.
The Elymaic alphabet is a right-to-left, non-joining abjad. It is derived from the Aramaic alphabet. Elymaic was used in the ancient state of Elymais, which was a semi-independent state of the 2nd century BCE to the early 3rd century CE, frequently a vassal under Parthian control, in the present-day region of Khuzestan, Iran (Susiana).
Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls is a Unicode block containing formatting characters that enable full formatting of quadrats for Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Nandinagari is a Unicode block containing characters for Nandinagari script, historically used to write Sanskrit in southern India.
Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong is a Unicode block containing characters devised in the 1980s for writing the White Hmong and Green Hmong languages.
Ottoman Siyaq Numbers is a Unicode block containing a specialized subset of the Arabic script that was used for accounting in Ottoman Turkish documents.
Tamil Supplement is a Unicode block containing Tamil historic fractions and symbols.
Wancho is a Unicode block containing the characters of the script used to write the Wancho language.
Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block.
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.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G is a Unicode block containing rare and historic CJK ideographs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It is the first block to be allocated to the Tertiary Ideographic Plane.
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2019-03-05.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2019-03-05.
- ↑ Pandey, Anshuman (2017-10-23). "L2/17226R2: Proposal to encode the Elymaic script in Unicode" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC.