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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.
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. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Generic Diacritical Marks.
Control Pictures is a Unicode block containing characters for graphically representing the C0 control codes, and other control characters. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Pictures for Control Codes.
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:
Many scripts in Unicode, such as Arabic, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms. In English, the common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t were combined. The rules governing ligature formation in Arabic can be quite complex, requiring special script-shaping technologies such as the Arabic Calligraphic Engine by Thomas Milo's DecoType.
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.
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.
Enclosed Alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop.
Syriac is a Unicode block containing characters for all forms of the Syriac alphabet, including the Estrangela, Serto, Eastern Syriac, and the Christian Palestinian Aramaic variants. It is used in Literary Syriac, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic among Syriac-speaking Christians. It was used historically to write Armenian, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Malayalam.
Byzantine Musical Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for representing Byzantine music in ekphonetic notation.
Javanese is a Unicode block containing aksara Jawa characters traditionally used for writing the Javanese language.
Aegean Numbers is a Unicode block containing punctuation, number, and unit characters for Linear A, Linear B, and the Cypriot syllabary, together Aegean numerals.
Ancient Greek Numbers is a Unicode block containing acrophonic numerals used in ancient Greece, including ligatures and special symbols.
Coptic Epact Numbers is a Unicode block containing Old Coptic number forms.
Sinhala Archaic Numbers is a Unicode block containing Sinhala Illakkam number characters.
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.
Chess Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for fairy chess and related notations beyond the basic Western chess symbols in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, as well as symbols representing game pieces for xiangqi.
Indic Siyaq Numbers is a Unicode block containing a specialized subset of the Arabic script that was used for accounting in India under the Mughals by the 17th century through the middle of the 20th century.
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
- ↑ "Chapter 22: Symbols". The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0 (PDF). Mountain View, CA: Unicode, Inc. March 2019. ISBN 978-1-936213-22-1.