A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, a relation between mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula. As formulas are entirely constituted with symbols of various types, many symbols are needed for expressing all mathematics.
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.
Bitstream Cyberbit is a commercial serif Unicode font designed by Bitstream Inc. It is freeware for non-commercial uses. It was one of the first widely available fonts to support a large portion of the Unicode repertoire.
Apple Symbols is a font introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther”. This is a TrueType font intended to provide coverage for characters defined as symbols in the Unicode Standard. It continues to ship with Mac OS X as part of the default installation. Prior to Mac OS X 10.5, its path was /Library/Fonts/Apple Symbols.ttf. From Mac OS X 10.5 onward, it is to be found at /System/Library/Fonts/Apple Symbols.ttf, meaning it is now considered an essential part of the system software, not to be deleted by users.
Monospace is a monospaced Unicode font, developed by George Williams. It is based on the typeface Courier. This font contains 2860 glyphs. It includes characters in the following unicode ranges: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters, Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Latin Extended Additional, Greek Extended, General Punctuation, Superscripts and Subscripts, Currency Symbols, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Mathematical Operators, Miscellaneous Technical, Control Pictures, Enclosed Alphanumerics, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes, Miscellaneous Symbols, Alphabetic Presentation Forms, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms.
An arrow is a graphical symbol, such as ← or →, or a pictogram, used to point or indicate direction. In its simplest form, an arrow is a triangle, chevron, or concave kite, usually affixed to a line segment or rectangle, and in more complex forms a representation of an actual arrow. The direction indicated by an arrow is the one along the length of the line or rectangle toward the single pointed end.
Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF.
Letterlike Symbols is a Unicode block containing 80 characters which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters. In addition to this block, Unicode includes full styled mathematical alphabets, although Unicode does not explicitly categorize these characters as being "letterlike."
Miscellaneous Technical is a Unicode block ranging from U+2300 to U+23FF, which 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.
In computing, a Unicode symbol is a Unicode character which is not part of a script used to write a natural language, but is nonetheless available for use as part of a text.
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.
Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows is a Unicode block containing arrows and geometric shapes with various fills, astrological symbols, technical symbols, intonation marks, and others.
Mathematical Operators is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and set notation.
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 15.1, five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named.
A variant form is a different glyph for a character, encoded in Unicode through the mechanism of variation sequences: sequences in Unicode that consist of a base character followed by a variation selector character.
PragmataPro is a monospaced font family designed for programming, created by Fabrizio Schiavi. It is a narrow programming font designed for legibility. The font implements Unicode characters, including (polytonic) Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and the APL codepoints. The font specifically implements ligatures for programming, such as multiple-character operators. The characters are hinted by hand.
