Symbols in Unicode
In addition to letters and other characters, Unicode also encodes a large number of different symbols . These range from the ancient symbols on the Phaistos disc to pictograms from ISO and other standards to emoji coded by Japanese cell phone companies. Logos and symbols that are not used in the linear flow of text, such as symbols that only appear in two-dimensional applications, are not coded .
Symbols derived from letters
Many currency symbols are in the currency symbol unicode block . There are also a number of currency symbols in other blocks that are next to the letters from which they were created. Symbols for ancient Roman currencies are encoded in the Unicode block Ancient symbols .
The blocks of letter-like symbols , mathematical alphanumeric symbols and Arabic mathematical alphanumeric symbols mainly contain letters in special fonts that are intended for use in mathematical formulas .
There are superscript and subscript characters scattered across different blocks. If these are not used together with the other characters for phonetic transcription in Unicode , the Unicode standard recommends instead using other positioning options, such as the tags and in HTML .
<sup><sub>
Finally, there are Enclosed Alphanumeric Characters , Enclosed CJK Characters and Months , Additional Enclosed Alphanumeric Characters and Additional Enclosed CJK Characters Letters and Characters Enclosed in Circles or Squares in the blocks .
Arrows and math operators
In addition to the letters, there are also a large number of other mathematical symbols in Unicode , including many arrows that can also be used for other purposes. Arrows are in the blocks Arrows , Additional Arrows-A , Additional Arrows-B , Additional Arrows-C and Various Symbols and Arrows . Mathematical operators are coded in the blocks Mathematical Operators , Various Mathematical Symbols-A , Various Mathematical Symbols-B and Additional Mathematical Operators .
Technical signs
In order to make control characters and spaces visible in documentation, there are corresponding symbols in the Unicode block Symbols for control characters . The Unicode block various technical characters encodes symbols for some special keys on the keyboard , symbols for the APL programming language and other symbols that can be used in technical documentation.
The Unicode block optical character recognition encodes some special symbols for OCR-A and MICR .
Geometric shapes
The two blocks frame drawing and block elements contain frame characters and other symbols that are used in character-oriented user interfaces , for example to represent frames. Further simple geometric shapes are in the Unicode blocks Geometric Shapes and Geometric Shapes, expanded .
Jewelry sign
The Unicode blocks dingbats and decorative symbols contain a number of decorative symbols that were taken from the ITC Zapf Dingbats font and other sources.
Pictograms
Unicode encodes a variety of icons of all kinds Larger groups are. Eight Trigrams , Sixty-four hexagrams and other n-grams from Taixuanjing and various symbols for board games : dice , figures for chess and Shogi , playing cards , dominoes and Mah-Jongg -stones. The pictograms are in the following blocks:
- Different symbols
- I-Ching hexagrams
- Tai Xuan Jing symbols
- Phaistos Disc
- Mahjongg stones
- dominoes
- Playing cards
- Various pictographic symbols
- Smileys
- Traffic and map symbols
- Alchemical symbols
With the characters from the Unicode block Combining diacritical marks for symbols , further pictograms can also be put together. In this way, each symbol can be converted into a prohibition sign with the surrounding crossed-out circle (U + 20E0) .
Part of it has been coded for compatibility with Japanese cellular standards and their emojis . These characters can come in two different styles, the common text style and the emoji style. These styles are selected by variant selectors . In the emoji style, such a character can also be displayed in multiple colors and even animated.
Musical notation
Characters for various historical and modern musical notations also have their own code points in Unicode, they are in the blocks Byzantine musical notation , musical notation and ancient Greek musical notation .
The notes of modern musical notation can also be put together with the help of combining symbols from the note head, note stem and flag, if necessary . There is no direct possibility of placing the note and thus specifying the pitch and must instead be specified using suitable file formats .
Braille characters
The characters for Braille are encoded in the Unicode block Braille characters in a logical order. How they are to be interpreted depends on the language and is not specified in Unicode. The Braille characters differ from the other symbols in that they are viewed as a separate writing system in Unicode .
swell
- Julie D. Allen et al .: The Unicode Standard. Version 6.2 - Core Specification. The Unicode Consortium, Mountain View, CA, 2012. ISBN 978-1-936213-07-8 . Chapter 15: Symbols. ( online , PDF)
