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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.
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block comprising styled forms of Latin and Greek letters and decimal digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different letter styles. The letters in various fonts often have specific, fixed meanings in particular areas of mathematics. By providing uniformity over numerous mathematical articles and books, these conventions help to read mathematical formulas. These also may be used to differentiate between concepts that share a letter in a single problem.
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.
Number Forms is a Unicode block containing Unicode compatibility characters that have specific meaning as numbers, but are constructed from other characters. They consist primarily of vulgar fractions and Roman numerals. In addition to the characters in the Number Forms block, three fractions were inherited from ISO-8859-1, which was incorporated whole as the Latin-1 Supplement block.
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal format (U+hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called "supplementary planes". The last code point in Unicode is the last code point in plane 16, U+10FFFF. As of Unicode version 16.0, five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named.
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 Khitan small script was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language. It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in present-day northeastern China. In addition to the small script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a functionally independent writing system known as the Khitan large script. Both Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchens for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty, until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface.
The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.
The Unicode block Braille Patterns (U+2800..U+28FF) contains all 256 possible patterns of an 8-dot braille cell, thereby including the complete 6-dot cell range. In Unicode, a braille cell does not have a letter or meaning defined. For example, Unicode does not define U+2817⠗BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1235 to be "R".
Mandaic is a Unicode block containing characters of the Mandaic script used for writing the historic Eastern Aramaic, also called Classical Mandaic, and the modern Neo-Mandaic language.
Cherokee is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters plus six lowercase letters. The Cherokee Supplement block, added in version 8.0, contains the rest of the lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.
Phags-pa is a Unicode block containing characters from the 'Phags-pa script promulgated as a national script by Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan dynasty. It was used primarily in writing Mongolian and Chinese, although it was intended for the use of all written languages of the Mongol Empire.
Javanese is a Unicode block containing aksara Jawa characters traditionally used for writing the Javanese language.
Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms is the name of a Unicode block U+FF00–FFEF, provided so that older encodings containing both halfwidth and fullwidth characters can have lossless translation to/from Unicode. It is the second-to-last block of the Basic Multilingual Plane, followed only by the short Specials block at U+FFF0–FFFF. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Halfwidth and Fullwidth Variants.
Latin Extended-E is a Unicode block containing Latin script characters used in German dialectology (Teuthonista), Anthropos alphabet, Sakha and Americanist usage.
Cherokee Supplement is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee Supplement block contains lowercase letters only, whereas the Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters, together with six lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.
Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation marks used by ideographic scripts such as Tangut and Nüshu.
Tangut is a Unicode block containing characters from the Tangut script, which was used for writing the Tangut language spoken by the Tangut people in the Western Xia Empire, and in China during the Yuan dynasty and early Ming dynasty.
Nushu is a Unicode block containing characters from the Nüshu script, which is a syllabary derived from Chinese characters that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China.
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.