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.
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."
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.
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:
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.
The Tangut script is a logographic writing system, formerly used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants. The Tangut characters are similar in appearance to Chinese characters, with the same type of strokes, but the methods of forming characters in the Tangut writing system are significantly different from those of forming Chinese characters. As in Chinese calligraphy, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing.
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:
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 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.
CJK Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation used for writing the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. It also contains one Chinese character.
CJK Compatibility is a Unicode block containing square symbols encoded for compatibility with East Asian character sets. In Unicode 1.0, it was divided into two blocks, named CJK Squared Words (U+3300–U+337F) and CJK Squared Abbreviations (U+3380–U+33FF). The square forms can have different presentations when they are used in horizontal or vertical text. For example, the characters U+333E㌾SQUARE BORUTO and U+3327㌧SQUARE TON should look different in horizontal and in vertical right-to-left: ㌧㌾
Dingbats is a Unicode block containing dingbats. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats; it was the Unicode block to have imported characters from a specific typeface; Unicode later adopted a policy that excluded symbols with "no demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text", and thus no further dingbat typefaces were encoded until Webdings and Wingdings were encoded in Version 7.0. Some ornaments are also an emoji, having optional presentation variants.
Counting Rod Numerals is a Unicode block containing traditional Chinese counting rod symbols, which mathematicians used for calculation in ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The orientation of the Unicode characters follows Song dynasty convention, with digits represented as horizontal lines, and tens represented as vertical lines, which differs from Han dynasty practice which represented digits as vertical lines, and tens as horizontal lines.
Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation marks used by ideographic scripts such as Tangut and Nüshu.
Tangut Components is a Unicode block containing components and radicals used in the modern study of the Tangut script.
Khitan Small Script is a Unicode block containing characters from the Khitan small script, which was used for writing the Khitan language spoken by the Khitan people in northern China during the Liao dynasty.
Tangut Supplement 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. This block is a supplement to the main Tangut block.
