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.
Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature shared in common by written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese.
A precomposed character is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diacritical mark, such as é. Technically, é (U+00E9) is a character that can be decomposed into an equivalent string of the base letter e (U+0065) and combining acute accent (U+0301). Similarly, ligatures are precompositions of their constituent letters or graphemes.
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.
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX.
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane, and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16. They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may assign 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.
Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.
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.
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode 16.0, Unicode defines a total of 97,680 characters.
Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with pre-existing standard character sets, which often included similar or identical characters.
The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set. The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set, is an international standard to map characters, discrete symbols used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other domains, to unique machine-readable data values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, and transmit—interchange—UCS-encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple interpretations depending on the character encoding in use, resulting in mojibake if the wrong one is chosen.
A numeral is a character that denotes a number. The decimal number digits 0–9 are used widely in various writing systems throughout the world, however the graphemes representing the decimal digits differ widely. Therefore Unicode includes 22 different sets of graphemes for the decimal digits, and also various decimal points, thousands separators, negative signs, etc. Unicode also includes several non-decimal numerals such as Aegean numerals, Roman numerals, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Cuneiform numerals and ancient Greek numerals. There is also a large number of typographical variations of the Western Arabic numerals provided for specialized mathematical use and for compatibility with earlier character sets, such as ² or ②, and composite characters such as ½.
In Unicode, a script is a collection of letters and other written signs used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems. Some scripts support one and only one writing system and language, for example, Armenian. Other scripts support many different writing systems; for example, the Latin script supports English, French, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Latin itself, and several other languages. Some languages make use of multiple alternate writing systems and thus also use several scripts; for example, in Turkish, the Arabic script was used before the 20th century but transitioned to Latin in the early part of the 20th century. More or less complementary to scripts are symbols and Unicode control characters.
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 Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.
A variant form is an alternate 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.
CJK Compatibility Ideographs is a Unicode block created to contain mostly Han characters that were encoded in multiple locations in other established character encodings, in addition to their CJK Unified Ideographs assignments, in order to retain round-trip compatibility between Unicode and those encodings. However, it also contains 12 unified ideographs sourced from Japanese character sets from IBM.
