Logo of the Unicode Consortium
| |
| Alias(es) | Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) |
|---|---|
| Language(s) | International |
| Standard | Unicode Standard |
| Encoding formats | UTF-8, UTF-16, GB18030 Less common: UTF-32, BOCU, SCSU, UTF-7 |
| Preceded by | ISO 8859, various others |
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of May 2019 the most recent version, Unicode 12.1, contains a repertoire of 137,994 characters (consisting of 137,766 graphic characters, 163 format characters and 65 control characters) covering 150 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.
The Unicode Standard consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and set of standard character encodings, a set of reference data files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).
Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java (and other programming languages), and the .NET Framework.
Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The Unicode standard defines UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, and several other encodings are in use. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UCS-2 (without full support for Unicode), a precursor of UTF-16; GB18030 is standardized in China and implements Unicode fully, while not an official Unicode standard.
UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the World Wide Web (used in over 94% of websites as of November 2019), uses one byte for the first 128 code points, and up to 4 bytes for other characters. The first 128 Unicode code points represent the ASCII characters, which means that any ASCII text is also a UTF-8 text.
UCS-2 uses two bytes (16 bits) for each character but can only encode the first 65,536 code points, the so-called Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). With 1,114,112 code points on 17 planes being possible, and with over 137,000 code points defined as of version 12.1, UCS-2 is only able to represent less than half of all encoded Unicode characters. Therefore, UCS-2 is outdated, though still widely used in software. UTF-16 extends UCS-2, by using the same 16-bit encoding as UCS-2 for the Basic Multilingual Plane, and a 4-byte encoding for the other planes. As long as it contains no code points in the reserved range U+D800–U+DFFF, a UCS-2 text is a valid UTF-16 text.
UTF-32 (also referred to as UCS-4) uses four bytes for each character. Like UCS-2, the number of bytes per character is fixed, facilitating character indexing; but unlike UCS-2, UTF-32 is able to encode all Unicode code points. However, because each character uses four bytes, UTF-32 takes significantly more space than other encodings, and is not widely used.
Origin and development
Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings, such as those defined by the ISO 8859
standard, which find wide usage in various countries of the world but
remain largely incompatible with each other. Many traditional character
encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer
processing (usually using Latin characters
and the local script), but not multilingual computer processing
(computer processing of arbitrary scripts mixed with each other).
Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs).
In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number,
not a glyph—for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a
character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering (size,
shape, font, or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor.
This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions
made by Unicode's designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid
adoption of Unicode.
The first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1
so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. Many
essentially identical characters were encoded multiple times at
different code points to preserve distinctions used by legacy encodings
and therefore, allow conversion from those encodings to Unicode (and
back) without losing any information. For example, the "fullwidth forms" section of code points encompasses a full duplicate of the Latin alphabet because Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK)
fonts contain two versions of these letters, "fullwidth" matching the
width of the CJK characters, and normal width. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode.
History
Based on experiences with the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) since 1980, the origins of Unicode date to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox with Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple, started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. With additional input from Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad,
Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an
"international/multilingual text character encoding system in August
1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "[t]he name
'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".
In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model:
Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body ASCII" that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.
His original 16-bit design was based on the assumption that only
those scripts and characters in modern use would need to be encoded:
Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 = 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally useful Unicodes.
In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken
Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan
Aliprand of RLG, and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems, and in 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag from Microsoft and Rick McGowan of NeXT
joined the group. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping
existing character encoding standards had been completed, and a final
review draft of Unicode was ready.
The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991,
and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was
published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in
June 1992.
In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in
Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This
increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which
allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphs)
and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been
anticipated as needing encoding. Among the characters not originally
intended for Unicode are rarely used Kanji or Chinese characters, many
of which are part of personal and place names, making them rarely used,
but much more essential than envisioned in the original architecture of
Unicode.
The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table.
Architecture and terminology
Unicode defines a codespace: a range of numerical values
available for encoding characters. For Unicode, the relevant codespace
is the range of integers from 0 to 10FFFF16. Any value in the codespace is called a code point.
Not all of these 1,114,112 code points are available for encoding
visible characters; some, for example, are assigned to control codes
like the carriage return.
Normally, when a number is considered as a Unicode code point, it
is referred to by writing "U+" followed by its hexadecimal number.
For code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), with code points 0 to FFFF16,
four hexadecimal digits are used, e.g. U+00F7 for the division sign
(÷). For code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used as
required, e.g. U+13254 for the Egyptian hieroglyph designating a reed shelter or a winding wall ( 
).
).Code point planes and blocks
The Unicode codespace is divided into seventeen planes, numbered 0 to 16:
All code points in the BMP are accessed as a single code unit in UTF-16 encoding and can be encoded in one, two or three bytes in UTF-8. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 (supplementary planes) are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16 and encoded in four bytes in UTF-8.
Within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks
of related characters. Although blocks are an arbitrary size, they are
always a multiple of 16 code points and often a multiple of 128 code
points. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over
several different blocks.
General Category property
Each code point has a single General Category
property. The major categories are denoted: Letter, Mark, Number,
Punctuation, Symbol, Separator and Other. Within these categories, there
are subdivisions. In most cases other properties must be used to
sufficiently specify the characteristics of a code point.
Code points in the range U+D800–U+DBFF (1,024 code points) are known as high-surrogate
code points, and code points in the range U+DC00–U+DFFF (1,024 code
points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code
point followed by a low-surrogate code point form a surrogate pair in UTF-16
to represent code points greater than U+FFFF. These code points
otherwise cannot be used (this rule is ignored often in practice
especially when not using UTF-16).
A small set of code points are guaranteed never to be used for
encoding characters, although applications may make use of these code
points internally if they wish. There are sixty-six of these noncharacters:
U+FDD0–U+FDEF and any code point ending in the value FFFE or FFFF
(i.e., U+FFFE, U+FFFF, U+1FFFE, U+1FFFF, … U+10FFFE, U+10FFFF). The set
of noncharacters is stable, and no new noncharacters will ever be
defined. Like surrogates, the rule that these cannot be used is often ignored, although the operation of the byte order mark assumes that U+FFFE will never be the first code point in a text.
Excluding surrogates and noncharacters leaves 1,111,998 code points available for use.
Private-use code points are considered to be assigned characters, but they have no interpretation specified by the Unicode standard
so any interchange of such characters requires an agreement between
sender and receiver on their interpretation. There are three private-use
areas in the Unicode codespace:
- Private Use Area: U+E000–U+F8FF (6,400 characters)
- Supplementary Private Use Area-A: U+F0000–U+FFFFD (65,534 characters)
- Supplementary Private Use Area-B: U+100000–U+10FFFD (65,534 characters).
Graphic characters are characters defined by Unicode to have particular semantics, and either have a visible glyph shape or represent a visible space. As of Unicode 12.1 there are 137,766 graphic characters.
Format characters are characters that do not have a
visible appearance, but may have an effect on the appearance or behavior
of neighboring characters. For example, U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER and U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER
may be used to change the default shaping behavior of adjacent
characters (e.g., to inhibit ligatures or request ligature formation).
There are 163 format characters in Unicode 12.1.
Sixty-five code points (U+0000–U+001F and U+007F–U+009F) are reserved as control codes, and correspond to the C0 and C1 control codes defined in ISO/IEC 6429.
U+0009 (Tab), U+000A (Line Feed), and U+000D (Carriage Return) are
widely used in Unicode-encoded texts. In practice the C1 code points are
often improperly-translated (Mojibake) legacy CP-1252 characters used by some English and Western European texts with Windows technologies.
Graphic characters, format characters, control code characters, and private use characters are known collectively as assigned characters. Reserved
code points are those code points which are available for use, but are
not yet assigned. As of Unicode 12.1 there are 836,536 reserved code
points.
Abstract characters
The set of graphic and format characters defined by Unicode does not correspond directly to the repertoire of abstract characters
that is representable under Unicode. Unicode encodes characters by
associating an abstract character with a particular code point.
However, not all abstract characters are encoded as a single Unicode
character, and some abstract characters may be represented in Unicode by
a sequence of two or more characters. For example, a Latin small letter
"i" with an ogonek, a dot above, and an acute accent, which is required in Lithuanian,
is represented by the character sequence U+012F, U+0307, U+0301.
Unicode maintains a list of uniquely named character sequences for
abstract characters that are not directly encoded in Unicode.
All graphic, format, and private use characters have a unique and
immutable name by which they may be identified. This immutability has
been guaranteed since Unicode version 2.0 by the Name Stability policy.
In cases where the name is seriously defective and misleading, or has a
serious typographical error, a formal alias may be defined, and
applications are encouraged to use the formal alias in place of the
official character name. For example, U+A015 ꀕ YI SYLLABLE WU has the formal alias YI SYLLABLE ITERATION MARK, and U+FE18 ︘ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRAKCET (sic) has the formal alias PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRACKET.
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates
Unicode's development. Full members include most of the main computer
software and hardware companies with any interest in text-processing
standards, including Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle Corporation.
Over the years several countries or government agencies have been members of the Unicode Consortium. Presently only the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman is a full member with voting rights.
The Consortium has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments.
Versions
Unicode is developed in conjunction with the International Organization for Standardization and shares the character repertoire with ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set. Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 function equivalently as character encodings, but The Unicode Standard contains much more information for implementers, covering—in depth—topics such as bitwise encoding, collation and rendering. The Unicode Standard enumerates a multitude of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text. The two standards do use slightly different terminology.
The Unicode Consortium first published The Unicode Standard
in 1991 (version 1.0), and has published new versions on a regular
basis since then. The latest version of the Unicode Standard, version
12.1, was released in May 2019, and is available in electronic format
from the consortium's website. The last version of the standard that was
published completely in book form (including the code charts) was
version 5.0 in 2006, but since version 5.2 (2009) the core specification
of the standard has been published as a print-on-demand paperback.
The entire text of each version of the standard, including the core
specification, standard annexes and code charts, is freely available in PDF format on the Unicode website.
Thus far, the following major and minor versions of the Unicode
standard have been published. Update versions, which do not include any
changes to character repertoire, are signified by the third number
(e.g., "version 4.0.1").
- The
number of characters listed for each version of Unicode is the total
number of graphic, format and control characters (i.e., excluding private-use characters, noncharacters and surrogate code points).
Scripts covered
Many modern applications can render a substantial subset of the many scripts in Unicode, as demonstrated by this screenshot from the OpenOffice.org application.
Unicode covers almost all scripts (writing systems) in current use today.
A total of 150 scripts are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets, abugidas and syllabaries),
although there are still scripts that are not yet encoded, particularly
those mainly used in historical, liturgical, and academic contexts.
Further additions of characters to the already encoded scripts, as well
as symbols, in particular for mathematics and music (in the form of notes and rhythmic symbols), also occur.
The Unicode Roadmap Committee (Michael Everson, Rick McGowan, Ken Whistler, V.S. Umamaheswaran)
maintain the list of scripts that are candidates or potential
candidates for encoding and their tentative code block assignments on
the Unicode Roadmap page of the Unicode Consortium Web site. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen and Khitan small script, encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For others scripts, such as Mayan (besides numbers) and Rongorongo,
no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character
repertoire and other details from the user communities involved.
Some modern invented scripts which have not yet been included in Unicode (e.g., Tengwar) or which do not qualify for inclusion in Unicode due to lack of real-world use (e.g., Klingon) are listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry, along with unofficial but widely used Private Use Area code assignments.
There is also a Medieval Unicode Font Initiative focused on special Latin medieval characters. Part of these proposals have been already included into Unicode.
The Script Encoding Initiative, a project run by Deborah Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley
was founded in 2002 with the goal of funding proposals for scripts not
yet encoded in the standard. The project has become a major source of
proposed additions to the standard in recent years.
Mapping and encodings
Several mechanisms have been specified for implementing Unicode. The choice depends on available storage space, source code compatibility, and interoperability with other systems.
Unicode Transformation Format and Universal Coded Character Set
Unicode defines two mapping methods: the Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) encodings, and the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) encodings. An encoding maps (possibly a subset of) the range of Unicode code points to sequences of values in some fixed-size range, termed code values. All UTF encodings map all code points (except surrogates) to a unique sequence of bytes.
The numbers in the names of the encodings indicate the number of bits
per code value (for UTF encodings) or the number of bytes per code value
(for UCS encodings). UTF-8 and UTF-16 are probably the most commonly
used encodings. UCS-2 is an obsolete subset of UTF-16; UCS-4 and UTF-32
are functionally equivalent.
UTF encodings include:
- UTF-1, a retired predecessor of UTF-8, maximizes compatibility with ISO 2022, no longer part of The Unicode Standard;
- UTF-7, a 7-bit encoding sometimes used in e-mail, often considered obsolete (not part of The Unicode Standard, but only documented as an informational RFC, i.e., not on the Internet Standards Track);
- UTF-8, an 8-bit variable-width encoding which maximizes compatibility with ASCII;
- UTF-EBCDIC, an 8-bit variable-width encoding similar to UTF-8, but designed for compatibility with EBCDIC (not part of The Unicode Standard);
- UTF-16, a 16-bit, variable-width encoding;
- UTF-32, a 32-bit, fixed-width encoding.
UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per code point and, being compact for Latin scripts and ASCII-compatible, provides the de facto standard encoding for interchange of Unicode text. It is used by FreeBSD and most recent Linux distributions as a direct replacement for legacy encodings in general text handling.
The UCS-2 and UTF-16 encodings specify the Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) for use at the beginnings of text files, which may be used for byte ordering detection (or byte endianness
detection). The BOM, code point U+FEFF has the important property of
unambiguity on byte reorder, regardless of the Unicode encoding used;
U+FFFE (the result of byte-swapping U+FEFF) does not equate to a legal
character, and U+FEFF in other places, other than the beginning of text,
conveys the zero-width non-break space (a character with no appearance
and no effect other than preventing the formation of ligatures).
The same character converted to UTF-8 becomes the byte sequence
EF BB BF. The Unicode Standard allows that the BOM "can serve as signature for UTF-8 encoded text where the character set is unmarked".
Some software developers have adopted it for other encodings, including
UTF-8, in an attempt to distinguish UTF-8 from local 8-bit code pages. However RFC 3629,
the UTF-8 standard, recommends that byte order marks be forbidden in
protocols using UTF-8, but discusses the cases where this may not be
possible. In addition, the large restriction on possible patterns in
UTF-8 (for instance there cannot be any lone bytes with the high bit
set) means that it should be possible to distinguish UTF-8 from other
character encodings without relying on the BOM.
In UTF-32 and UCS-4, one 32-bit
code value serves as a fairly direct representation of any character's
code point (although the endianness, which varies across different
platforms, affects how the code value manifests as an octet sequence).
In the other encodings, each code point may be represented by a variable
number of code values. UTF-32 is widely used as an internal
representation of text in programs (as opposed to stored or transmitted
text), since every Unix operating system that uses the gcc compilers to generate software uses it as the standard "wide character" encoding. Some programming languages, such as Seed7, use UTF-32 as internal representation for strings and characters. Recent versions of the Python
programming language (beginning with 2.2) may also be configured to use
UTF-32 as the representation for Unicode strings, effectively
disseminating such encoding in high-level coded software.
Punycode, another encoding form, enables the encoding of Unicode strings into the limited character set supported by the ASCII-based Domain Name System (DNS). The encoding is used as part of IDNA, which is a system enabling the use of Internationalized Domain Names in all scripts that are supported by Unicode. Earlier and now historical proposals include UTF-5 and UTF-6.
GB18030 is another encoding form for Unicode, from the Standardization Administration of China. It is the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC). BOCU-1 and SCSU are Unicode compression schemes. The April Fools' Day RFC of 2005 specified two parody UTF encodings, UTF-9 and UTF-18.
Ready-made versus composite characters
Unicode
includes a mechanism for modifying characters that greatly extends the
supported glyph repertoire. This covers the use of combining diacritical marks
that may be added after the base character by the user. Multiple
combining diacritics may be simultaneously applied to the same
character. Unicode also contains precomposed
versions of most letter/diacritic combinations in normal use. These
make conversion to and from legacy encodings simpler, and allow
applications to use Unicode as an internal text format without having to
implement combining characters. For example, é can be represented in Unicode as U+0065 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E) followed by U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT), but it can also be represented as the precomposed character U+00E9 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE).
Thus, in many cases, users have multiple ways of encoding the same
character. To deal with this, Unicode provides the mechanism of canonical equivalence.
An example of this arises with Hangul,
the Korean alphabet. Unicode provides a mechanism for composing Hangul
syllables with their individual subcomponents, known as Hangul Jamo. However, it also provides 11,172 combinations of precomposed syllables made from the most common jamo.
The CJK
characters currently have codes only for their precomposed form. Still,
most of those characters comprise simpler elements (called radicals),
so in principle Unicode could have decomposed them as it did with
Hangul. This would have greatly reduced the number of required code
points, while allowing the display of virtually every conceivable
character (which might do away with some of the problems caused by Han unification). A similar idea is used by some input methods, such as Cangjie and Wubi.
However, attempts to do this for character encoding have stumbled over
the fact that Chinese characters do not decompose as simply or as
regularly as Hangul does.
A set of radicals
was provided in Unicode 3.0 (CJK radicals between U+2E80 and U+2EFF,
KangXi radicals in U+2F00 to U+2FDF, and ideographic description
characters from U+2FF0 to U+2FFB), but the Unicode standard (ch. 12.2 of
Unicode 5.2) warns against using ideographic description sequences as an alternate representation for previously encoded characters:
This process is different from a formal encoding of an ideograph. There is no canonical description of unencoded ideographs; there is no semantic assigned to described ideographs; there is no equivalence defined for described ideographs. Conceptually, ideographic descriptions are more akin to the English phrase "an 'e' with an acute accent on it" than to the character sequence .
Ligatures
Many scripts, including Arabic and Devanagari, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms.
The rules governing ligature formation can be quite complex, requiring
special script-shaping technologies such as ACE (Arabic Calligraphic
Engine by DecoType in the 1980s and used to generate all the Arabic
examples in the printed editions of the Unicode Standard), which became
the proof of concept for OpenType (by Adobe and Microsoft), Graphite (by SIL International), or AAT (by Apple).
Instructions are also embedded in fonts to tell the operating system
how to properly output different character sequences. A simple solution
to the placement of combining marks or diacritics is assigning the
marks a width of zero and placing the glyph itself to the left or right
of the left sidebearing
(depending on the direction of the script they are intended to be used
with). A mark handled this way will appear over whatever character
precedes it, but will not adjust its position relative to the width or
height of the base glyph; it may be visually awkward and it may overlap
some glyphs. Real stacking is impossible, but can be approximated in
limited cases (for example, Thai top-combining vowels and tone marks can
just be at different heights to start with). Generally this approach is
only effective in monospaced fonts, but may be used as a fallback
rendering method when more complex methods fail.
Standardized subsets
Several subsets of Unicode are standardized: Microsoft Windows since Windows NT 4.0 supports WGL-4
with 656 characters, which is considered to support all contemporary
European languages using the Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic script. Other
standardized subsets of Unicode include the Multilingual European
Subsets:
MES-1 (Latin scripts only, 335 characters), MES-2 (Latin, Greek and Cyrillic 1062 characters)[55] and MES-3A & MES-3B (two larger subsets, not shown here). Note that MES-2 includes every character in MES-1 and WGL-4.
| Row | Cells | Range(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | 20–7E | Basic Latin (00–7F) |
| A0–FF | Latin-1 Supplement (80–FF) | |
| 01 | 00–13, 14–15, 16–2B, 2C–2D, 2E–4D, 4E–4F, 50–7E, 7F | Latin Extended-A (00–7F) |
| 8F, 92, B7, DE-EF, FA–FF | Latin Extended-B (80–FF ...) | |
| 02 | 18–1B, 1E–1F | Latin Extended-B (... 00–4F) |
| 59, 7C, 92 | IPA Extensions (50–AF) | |
| BB–BD, C6, C7, C9, D6, D8–DB, DC, DD, DF, EE | Spacing Modifier Letters (B0–FF) | |
| 03 | 74–75, 7A, 7E, 84–8A, 8C, 8E–A1, A3–CE, D7, DA–E1 | Greek (70–FF) |
| 04 | 00–5F, 90–91, 92–C4, C7–C8, CB–CC, D0–EB, EE–F5, F8–F9 | Cyrillic (00–FF) |
| 1E | 02–03, 0A–0B, 1E–1F, 40–41, 56–57, 60–61, 6A–6B, 80–85, 9B, F2–F3 | Latin Extended Additional (00–FF) |
| 1F | 00–15, 18–1D, 20–45, 48–4D, 50–57, 59, 5B, 5D, 5F–7D, 80–B4, B6–C4, C6–D3, D6–DB, DD–EF, F2–F4, F6–FE | Greek Extended (00–FF) |
| 20 | 13–14, 15, 17, 18–19, 1A–1B, 1C–1D, 1E, 20–22, 26, 30, 32–33, 39–3A, 3C, 3E, 44, 4A | General Punctuation (00–6F) |
| 7F, 82 | Superscripts and Subscripts (70–9F) | |
| A3–A4, A7, AC, AF | Currency Symbols (A0–CF) | |
| 21 | 05, 13, 16, 22, 26, 2E | Letterlike Symbols (00–4F) |
| 5B–5E | Number Forms (50–8F) | |
| 90–93, 94–95, A8 | Arrows (90–FF) | |
| 22 | 00, 02, 03, 06, 08–09, 0F, 11–12, 15, 19–1A, 1E–1F, 27–28, 29, 2A, 2B, 48, 59, 60–61, 64–65, 82–83, 95, 97 | Mathematical Operators (00–FF) |
| 23 | 02, 0A, 20–21, 29–2A | Miscellaneous Technical (00–FF) |
| 25 | 00, 02, 0C, 10, 14, 18, 1C, 24, 2C, 34, 3C, 50–6C | Box Drawing (00–7F) |
| 80, 84, 88, 8C, 90–93 | Block Elements (80–9F) | |
| A0–A1, AA–AC, B2, BA, BC, C4, CA–CB, CF, D8–D9, E6 | Geometric Shapes (A0–FF) | |
| 26 | 3A–3C, 40, 42, 60, 63, 65–66, 6A, 6B | Miscellaneous Symbols (00–FF) |
| F0 | (01–02) | Private Use Area (00–FF ...) |
| FB | 01–02 | Alphabetic Presentation Forms (00–4F) |
| FF | FD | Specials |
Rendering software which cannot process a Unicode character
appropriately often displays it as an open rectangle, or the Unicode "replacement character"
(U+FFFD, �), to indicate the position of the unrecognized character.
Some systems have made attempts to provide more information about such
characters. Apple's Last Resort font will display a substitute glyph indicating the Unicode range of the character, and the SIL International's Unicode Fallback font will display a box showing the hexadecimal scalar value of the character.
Code point lookup
Online tools for finding the code point for a known character include Unicode Lookup by Jonathan Hedley and Shapecatcher
by Benjamin Milde. In Unicode Lookup, one enters a search key (e.g.
"fractions"), and a list of corresponding characters with their code
points is returned. In Shapecatcher, based on Shape context, one draws the character in a box and a list of characters approximating the drawing, with their code points, is returned.
Adoption
Operating systems
Unicode
has become the dominant scheme for internal processing and storage of
text. Although a great deal of text is still stored in legacy encodings,
Unicode is used almost exclusively for building new information
processing systems. Early adopters tended to use UCS-2 (the fixed-width two-byte precursor to UTF-16) and later moved to UTF-16
(the variable-width current standard), as this was the least disruptive
way to add support for non-BMP characters. The best known such system
is Windows NT (and its descendants, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10), which uses UTF-16 as the sole internal character encoding. The Java and .NET bytecode environments, macOS, and KDE also use it for internal representation. Partial support for Unicode can be installed on Windows 9x through the Microsoft Layer for Unicode.
UTF-8 (originally developed for Plan 9) has become the main storage encoding on most Unix-like operating systems (though others are also used by some libraries) because it is a relatively easy replacement for traditional extended ASCII character sets. UTF-8 is also the most common Unicode encoding used in HTML documents on the World Wide Web.
Multilingual text-rendering engines which use Unicode include Uniscribe and DirectWrite for Microsoft Windows, ATSUI and Core Text for macOS, and Pango for GTK+ and the GNOME desktop.
Input methods
Because keyboard layouts cannot have simple key combinations for all
characters, several operating systems provide alternative input methods
that allow access to the entire repertoire.
ISO/IEC 14755, which standardises methods for entering Unicode characters from their code points, specifies several methods. There is the Basic method, where a beginning sequence is followed by the hexadecimal representation of the code point and the ending sequence. There is also a screen-selection entry method specified, where the characters are listed in a table in a screen, such as with a character map program.
MIME defines two different mechanisms for encoding non-ASCII characters in email,
depending on whether the characters are in email headers (such as the
"Subject:"), or in the text body of the message; in both cases, the
original character set is identified as well as a transfer encoding. For
email transmission of Unicode, the UTF-8 character set and the Base64 or the Quoted-printable transfer encoding are recommended, depending on whether much of the message consists of ASCII
characters. The details of the two different mechanisms are specified
in the MIME standards and generally are hidden from users of email
software.
The adoption of Unicode in email has been very slow. Some East Asian text is still encoded in encodings such as ISO-2022,
and some devices, such as mobile phones, still cannot correctly handle
Unicode data. Support has been improving, however. Many major free mail
providers such as Yahoo, Google (Gmail), and Microsoft (Outlook.com) support it.
Web
All W3C recommendations have used Unicode as their document character set since HTML 4.0. Web browsers have supported Unicode, especially UTF-8, for many years. There used to be display problems resulting primarily from font related issues; e.g. v 6 and older of Microsoft Internet Explorer did not render many code points unless explicitly told to use a font that contains them.
Although syntax rules may affect the order in which characters are allowed to appear, XML (including XHTML) documents, by definition, comprise characters from most of the Unicode code points, with the exception of:
- most of the C0 control codes
- the permanently unassigned code points D800–DFFF
- FFFE or FFFF
HTML characters manifest either directly as bytes
according to document's encoding, if the encoding supports them, or
users may write them as numeric character references based on the
character's Unicode code point. For example, the references
Δ Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말 (or the same numeric values expressed in hexadecimal, with &#x as the prefix) should display on all browsers as Δ, Й, ק ,م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 말.
When specifying URIs, for example as URLs in HTTP requests, non-ASCII characters must be percent-encoded.
Fonts
Unicode is not in principle concerned with fonts per se, seeing them as implementation choices. Any given character may have many allographs,
from the more common bold, italic and base letterforms to complex
decorative styles. A font is "Unicode compliant" if the glyphs in the
font can be accessed using code points defined in the Unicode standard.
The standard does not specify a minimum number of characters that must
be included in the font; some fonts have quite a small repertoire.
Free and retail fonts based on Unicode are widely available, since TrueType and OpenType support Unicode. These font formats map Unicode code points to glyphs, but TrueType font is restricted to 65,535 glyphs.
Thousands of fonts
exist on the market, but fewer than a dozen fonts—sometimes described
as "pan-Unicode" fonts—attempt to support the majority of Unicode's
character repertoire. Instead, Unicode-based fonts
typically focus on supporting only basic ASCII and particular scripts
or sets of characters or symbols. Several reasons justify this approach:
applications and documents rarely need to render characters from more
than one or two writing systems; fonts tend to demand resources in
computing environments; and operating systems and applications show
increasing intelligence in regard to obtaining glyph information from
separate font files as needed, i.e., font substitution.
Furthermore, designing a consistent set of rendering instructions for
tens of thousands of glyphs constitutes a monumental task; such a
venture passes the point of diminishing returns for most typefaces.
Newlines
Unicode partially addresses the newline problem that occurs when trying to read a text file on different platforms. Unicode defines a large number of characters that conforming applications should recognize as line terminators.
In terms of the newline, Unicode introduced U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR.
This was an attempt to provide a Unicode solution to encoding
paragraphs and lines semantically, potentially replacing all of the
various platform solutions. In doing so, Unicode does provide a way
around the historical platform dependent solutions. Nonetheless, few if
any Unicode solutions have adopted these Unicode line and paragraph
separators as the sole canonical line ending characters. However, a
common approach to solving this issue is through newline normalization.
This is achieved with the Cocoa text system in Mac OS X and also with
W3C XML and HTML recommendations. In this approach every possible
newline character is converted internally to a common newline (which one
does not really matter since it is an internal operation just for
rendering). In other words, the text system can correctly treat the
character as a newline, regardless of the input's actual encoding.
Issues
Philosophical and completeness criticisms
Han unification (the identification of forms in the East Asian languages
which one can treat as stylistic variations of the same historical
character) has become one of the most controversial aspects of Unicode,
despite the presence of a majority of experts from all three regions in
the Ideographic Research Group (IRG), which advises the Consortium and ISO on additions to the repertoire and on Han unification.
Unicode has been criticized for failing to separately encode older and alternative forms of kanji
which, critics argue, complicates the processing of ancient Japanese
and uncommon Japanese names. This is often due to the fact that Unicode
encodes characters rather than glyphs (the visual representations of the
basic character that often vary from one language to another).
Unification of glyphs leads to the perception that the languages
themselves, not just the basic character representation, are being
merged.
There have been several attempts to create alternative encodings that
preserve the stylistic differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
characters in opposition to Unicode's policy of Han unification. An
example of one is TRON (although it is not widely adopted in Japan, there are some users who need to handle historical Japanese text and favor it).
Although the repertoire of fewer than 21,000 Han characters in
the earliest version of Unicode was largely limited to characters in
common modern usage, Unicode now includes more than 87,000 Han
characters, and work is continuing to add thousands more historic and
dialectal characters used in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Modern font technology provides a means to address the practical
issue of needing to depict a unified Han character in terms of a
collection of alternative glyph representations, in the form of Unicode variation sequences. For example, the Advanced Typographic tables of OpenType
permit one of a number of alternative glyph representations to be
selected when performing the character to glyph mapping process. In this
case, information can be provided within plain text to designate which
alternate character form to select.
Various Cyrillic characters shown with and without italics
If the difference in the appropriate glyphs for two characters in the
same script differ only in the italic, Unicode has generally unified
them, as can be seen in the comparison between Russian (labeled
standard) and Serbian characters at right, meaning that the differences
are displayed through smart font technology or manually changing fonts.
Mapping to legacy character sets
Unicode was designed to provide code-point-by-code-point round-trip format conversion
to and from any preexisting character encodings, so that text files in
older character sets can be converted to Unicode and then back and get
back the same file, without employing context-dependent interpretation.
That has meant that inconsistent legacy architectures, such as combining diacritics and precomposed characters,
both exist in Unicode, giving more than one method of representing some
text. This is most pronounced in the three different encoding forms for
Korean Hangul.
Since version 3.0, any precomposed characters that can be represented
by a combining sequence of already existing characters can no longer be
added to the standard in order to preserve interoperability between
software using different versions of Unicode.
Injective
mappings must be provided between characters in existing legacy
character sets and characters in Unicode to facilitate conversion to
Unicode and allow interoperability with legacy software. Lack of
consistency in various mappings between earlier Japanese encodings such
as Shift-JIS or EUC-JP and Unicode led to round-trip format conversion
mismatches, particularly the mapping of the character JIS X 0208 '～'
(1-33, WAVE DASH), heavily used in legacy database data, to either U+FF5E ～ FULLWIDTH TILDE (in Microsoft Windows) or U+301C 〜 WAVE DASH (other vendors).
Some Japanese computer programmers objected to Unicode because it requires them to separate the use of U+005C \ REVERSE SOLIDUS (backslash) and U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN, which was mapped to 0x5C in JIS X 0201, and a lot of legacy code exists with this usage. (This encoding also replaces tilde '~' 0x7E with macron '¯', now 0xAF.) The separation of these characters exists in ISO 8859-1, from long before Unicode.
Indic scripts
Indic scripts such as Tamil and Devanagari are each allocated only 128 code points, matching the ISCII
standard. The correct rendering of Unicode Indic text requires
transforming the stored logical order characters into visual order and
the forming of ligatures (aka conjuncts) out of components. Some local
scholars argued in favor of assignments of Unicode code points to these
ligatures, going against the practice for other writing systems, though
Unicode contains some Arabic and other ligatures for backward
compatibility purposes only.
Encoding of any new ligatures in Unicode will not happen, in part
because the set of ligatures is font-dependent, and Unicode is an
encoding independent of font variations. The same kind of issue arose
for the Tibetan script in 2003 when the Standardization Administration of China proposed encoding 956 precomposed Tibetan syllables, but these were rejected for encoding by the relevant ISO committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2).
Thai alphabet
support has been criticized for its ordering of Thai characters. The
vowels เ, แ, โ, ใ, ไ that are written to the left of the preceding
consonant are in visual order instead of phonetic order, unlike the
Unicode representations of other Indic scripts. This complication is due
to Unicode inheriting the Thai Industrial Standard 620,
which worked in the same way, and was the way in which Thai had always
been written on keyboards. This ordering problem complicates the Unicode
collation process slightly, requiring table lookups to reorder Thai
characters for collation.
Even if Unicode had adopted encoding according to spoken order, it
would still be problematic to collate words in dictionary order. E.g.,
the word แสดง [sa dɛːŋ]
"perform" starts with a consonant cluster "สด" (with an inherent vowel
for the consonant "ส"), the vowel แ-, in spoken order would come after
the ด, but in a dictionary, the word is collated as it is written, with
the vowel following the ส.
Combining characters
Characters with diacritical marks can generally be represented either
as a single precomposed character or as a decomposed sequence of a base
letter plus one or more non-spacing marks. For example, ḗ (precomposed e
with macron and acute above) and ḗ (e followed by the combining
macron above and combining acute above) should be rendered identically,
both appearing as an e with a macron and acute accent,
but in practice, their appearance may vary depending upon what
rendering engine and fonts are being used to display the characters.
Similarly, underdots, as needed in the romanization of Indic, will often be placed incorrectly.
Unicode characters that map to precomposed glyphs can be used in many
cases, thus avoiding the problem, but where no precomposed character has
been encoded the problem can often be solved by using a specialist
Unicode font such as Charis SIL that uses Graphite, OpenType, or AAT technologies for advanced rendering features.
Anomalies
The Unicode standard has imposed rules intended to guarantee stability.
Depending on the strictness of a rule, a change can be prohibited or
allowed. For example, a "name" given to a code point cannot and will not
change. But a "script" property is more flexible, by Unicode's own
rules. In version 2.0, Unicode changed many code point "names" from
version 1. At the same moment, Unicode stated that from then on, an
assigned name to a code point will never change anymore. This implies
that when mistakes are published, these mistakes cannot be corrected,
even if they are trivial (as happened in one instance with the spelling BRAKCET for BRACKET
in a character name). In 2006 a list of anomalies in character names
was first published, and, as of April 2017, there were 94 characters
with identified issues, for example:
- U+2118 ℘ SCRIPT CAPITAL P: This is a small letter. The capital is U+1D4AB 𝒫 MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P
- U+034F ͏ COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER: Does not join graphemes.
- U+A015 ꀕ YI SYLLABLE WU: This is not a Yi syllable, but a Yi iteration mark.
- U+FE18 ︘ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRAKCET: bracket is spelled incorrectly.
Spelling errors are resolved by using Unicode alias names and abbreviations.
