This article is about the computer text standard. For the 1889 Universal Telegraphic Phrase-book see Commercial code (communications). This article contains special characters. Without proper rendering support you may see question marks boxes or other symbols. The Unicode Standard version 5.0

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 109000 characters covering 93 scripts a set of code charts for visual reference an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case a set of reference data computer 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).1 As of 2011 the most recent major revision of Unicode is Unicode 6.0.

The Unicode Consortium the nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development 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.

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 XML the Java programming language the Microsoft .NET Framework and modern operating systems.

Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 (which uses one byte for any ASCII characters which have the same code values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding and up to four bytes for other characters) the now-obsolete UCS-2 (which uses two bytes for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard) and UTF-16 (which extends UCS-2 to handle code points beyond the scope of UCS-2). Contents 1 Origin and development 1.1 History 1.2 Architecture and terminology 1.2.1 Code point planes and blocks 1.2.2 Character General Category 1.2.3 Abstract characters 1.3 Standard 1.4 Scripts covered 2 Mapping and encodings 2.1 Unicode Transformation Format and Universal Character Set 2.2 Ready-made versus composite characters 2.3 Ligatures 2.4 Standardized subsets 3 Unicode in use 3.1 Operating systems 3.2 Input methods 3.3 E-mail 3.4 Web 3.5 Fonts 3.6 New lines 4 Issues 4.1 Philosophical and completeness criticisms 4.2 Mapping to legacy character sets 4.3 Indic scripts 4.4 Combining characters 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links 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 charactersgraphemes and grapheme-like unitsrather 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 (see Han unification).

In text processing Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code pointa number not a glyphfor 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 Latin alphabet that is separate from the main Latin alphabet section. In Chinese Japanese and Korean (CJK) fonts these characters are rendered at the same width as CJK ideographs rather than at half the width. For other examples see Duplicate characters in Unicode. History

The origins of Unicode date back to 1987 when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.2 In August 1988 Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system tentatively called Unicode". Although the term "Unicode" had previously been used for other purposes such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s3 and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 18894 Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages and he explained that "the name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique unified universal encoding".5 In this document entitled Unicode 88 Becker outlined a 16-bit character model:5 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:5 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 16384. 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 on January 3 1991 in the state of California 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. Architecture and terminology Unicode defines a codespace of 1114112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex.6 Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing "U+" followed by its hexadecimal number. For code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) four digits are used (e.g. U+0058 for the character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER X); for code points outside the BMP five or six digits are used as required (e.g. U+E0001 for the character LANGUAGE TAG and U+10FFFD for the character PRIVATE USE CHARACTER-10FFFD). Older versions of the standard used similar notations but with slightly different rules. For example Unicode 3.0 used "U-" followed by eight digits and allowed "U+" to be used only with exactly four digits to indicate a code unitclarification needed not a code point. Code point planes and blocks Main article: Unicode plane The Unicode codespace is divided into seventeen planes numbered 0 to 16:  v d e Unicode planes and code point (character) ranges Basic Supplementary 0000FFFF 100001FFFF 200002FFFF 30000DFFFF E0000EFFFF F000010FFFF Plane 0: Basic Multilingual Plane Plane 1: Supplementary Multilingual Plane Plane 2: Supplementary Ideographic Plane Planes 313: Unassigned Plane 14: Supplementary Special-purpose Plane Planes 1516: Private Use Area BMP SMP SIP SSP PUA 00000FFF 10001FFF 20002FFF 30003FFF 40004FFF 50005FFF 60006FFF 70007FFF 80008FFF 90009FFF A000AFFF B000BFFF C000CFFF D000DFFF E000EFFF F000FFFF 1000010FFF 1100011FFF 1200012FFF 1300013FFF 1600016FFF 1B0001BFFF 1D0001DFFF 1F0001FFFF 2000020FFF 2100021FFF 2200022FFF 2300023FFF 2400024FFF 2500025FFF 2600026FFF 2700027FFF 2800028FFF 2900029FFF 2A0002AFFF 2B0002BFFF 2F0002FFFF E0000E0FFF 15: PUA-A F0000FFFFF 16: PUA-B 10000010FFFF 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 or informally astral 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. Character General Category Each code point has a single General Category property. The major categories are: Letter Mark Number Punctuation Symbol Separator and Other. Within these categories there are subdivisions. The General Category is not useful for every use since legacy encodings have used multiple characteristics per single code point. E.g. U+000A <control-000A> Line feed (LF) in ASCII is both a control and a formatting separator; in Unicode the General Category is "Other Control". Often other properties must be used to specify the characteristics and behaviour of a code point. The possible General Categories are: General Category (Unicode character property)1v d e  Value Category Major minor Basic type2 Character assigned2 Fixed3 Remarks &000Letter &001Lu Letter uppercase Graphic Character &002Ll Letter lowercase Graphic Character &003Lt Letter titlecase Graphic Character &004Lm Letter modifier Graphic Character &005Lo Letter other Graphic Character &010Mark &011Mn Mark nonspacing Graphic Character &012Mc Mark spacing combining Graphic Character &013Me Mark enclosing Graphic Character &020Number &021Nd Number decimal digit Graphic Character All these and only these have Numeric Type De3 &022Nl Number letter Graphic Character &023No Number other Graphic Character &030Punctuation &031Pc Punctuation connector Graphic Character &032Pd Punctuation dash Graphic Character &033Ps Punctuation open Graphic Character &034Pe Punctuation close Graphic Character &035Pi Punctuation initial quote Graphic Character May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage &036Pf Punctuation final quote Graphic Character May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage &037Po Punctuation other Graphic Character &040Symbol &041Sm Symbol math Graphic Character &042Sc Symbol currency Graphic Character &043Sk Symbol modifier Graphic Character &044So Symbol other Graphic Character &050Separator &051Zs Separator space Graphic Character &052Zl Separator line Format Character Only U+2028 line separator (LSEP) &053Zp Separator paragraph Format Character Only U+2029 paragraph separator (PSEP) &060Other &061Cc Other control Control Character Fixed 65 No name4 <control> &062Cf Other format Format Character &063Cs Other surrogate Surrogate Not Fixed 2048 No name4 <surrogate> &064Co Other private use Private-use Not Fixed 6400 in BMP 131068 in Planes 1516 No name4 <private-use> &065Cn Other not assigned Noncharacter Not Fixed 66 No name4 <noncharacter> Reserved Not Not fixed No name4 <reserved> Notes 1. Unicode 6.0 Chapter 4 table 4-9 2. Unicode 6.0 Chapter 2 table 2-3: Types of code points 3. Stability policy: Property Value Stability and table. Stability policy: Some gc groups will never change. gcNd corresponds with Numeric TypeDe (decimal). 4. Unicode 6.0 Chapter 4 table 4-12 Name""; a Code Point Label may be used to identify a nameless code point. E.g. <control-hhhh> <control-0088>. The Name remains blank which can prevent inadvertently replacing in documentation a Control Name with a true Control code. Unicode also uses <not a character> for <noncharacter>. Code points in the range U+D800..U+DBFF (1024 code points) are known as high-surrogate code points and code points in the range U+DC00..U+DFFF (1024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point (also known as a leading surrogate) followed by a low-surrogate code point (also known as a trailing surrogate) together form a surrogate pair used in UTF-16 to represent 1048576 code points outside BMP. High and low surrogate code points are not valid by themselves. Thus the range of code points that are available for use as characters is U+0000..U+D7FF and U+E000..U+10FFFF (1112064 code points). The value of these code points (i.e. excluding surrogates) is sometimes referred to as the character's scalar value. Certain noncharacter 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 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.7 Reserved code points are those code points which are available for use as encoded characters but are not yet defined as characters by Unicode. Private-use code points are considered to be assigned characters but they have no interpretation specified by the Unicode standard8 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 (6400 characters) Supplementary Private Use Area-A: U+F0000..U+FFFFD (65534 characters) Supplementary Private Use Area-B: U+100000..U+10FFFD (65534 characters). Graphic characters are characters defined by Unicode to have a particular semantic and either have a visible glyph shape or represent a visible space. As of Unicode 6.0 there are 109242 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 142 format characters in Unicode 6.0. 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. Of these U+0009 (Tab) U+000A (Line Feed) and U+000D (Carriage Return) are widely used in Unicode-encoded texts. Graphic characters format characters control code characters and private use characters are known collectively as assigned characters. 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.9 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.10 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.7 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 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.11 Standard The Unicode Consortium based in California develops the Unicode standard. There are various levels of membership and any company or individual willing to pay the membership dues may join this organization. Full members include most of the main computer software and hardware companies with any interest in text-processing standards including Adobe Systems Apple Google IBM Microsoft Oracle Corporation Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.12 The Consortium first published The Unicode Standard (ISBN 0-321-18578-1) in 1991 and continues to develop standards based on that original work. The latest major version of the standard Unicode 6.0 was published on-line in 2010 and is available from the consortium's web site. The last version to be published in book form was Unicode 5.0 (ISBN 0-321-48091-0) but since Unicode 6.0 the standard has no longer been published in book form. 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 coveringin depthtopics 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. 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 omitted).13 Version Date Book Corresponding ISO/IEC 10646 Edition Scripts Characters # Notable additions 1.0.0 October 1991 ISBN 0-201-56788-1 (Vol.1) 24 7161 Initial repertoire covers these scripts: Arabic Armenian Bengali Bopomofo Cyrillic Devanagari Georgian Greek and Coptic Gujarati Gurmukhi Hangul Hebrew Hiragana Kannada Katakana Lao Latin Malayalam Oriya Tamil Telugu Thai and Tibetan.14 1.0.1 June 1992 ISBN 0-201-60845-6 (Vol.2) 25 28359 The initial set of 20902 CJK Unified Ideographs is defined.15 1.1 June 1993 ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 24 34233 4306 more Hangul syllables added to original set of 2350 characters. Tibetan removed.16 2.0 July 1996 ISBN 0-201-48345-9 ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5 6 and 7 25 38950 Original set of Hangul syllables removed and a new set of 11172 Hangul syllables added at a new location. Tibetan added back in a new location and with a different character repertoire. Surrogate character mechanism defined and Plane 15 and Plane 16 Private Use Areas allocated.17 2.1 May 1998 ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5 6 and 7 and two characters from Amendment 18 25 38952 Euro sign added.18 3.0 September 1999 ISBN 0-201-61633-5 ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 38 49259 Cherokee Ethiopic Khmer Mongolian Myanmar Ogham Runic Sinhala Syriac Thaana Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and Yi Syllables added as well as a set of Braille patterns.19 3.1 March 2001 ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 41 94205 Deseret Gothic and Old Italic added as well as sets of symbols for Western music and Byzantine music and 42711 additional CJK Unified Ideographs.20 3.2 March 2002 ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 plus Amendment 1 ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001 45 95221 Philippine scripts Buhid Hanun'o Tagalog and Tagbanwa added.21 4.0 April 2003 ISBN 0-321-18578-1 ISO/IEC 10646:2003 52 96447 Cypriot syllabary Limbu Linear B Osmanya Shavian Tai Le and Ugaritic added as well as Hexagram symbols.22 4.1 March 2005 ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendment 1 59 97720 Buginese Glagolitic Kharoshthi New Tai Lue Old Persian Syloti Nagri and Tifinagh added and Coptic was disunified from Greek. Ancient Greek numbers and musical symbols were also added.23 5.0 July 2006 ISBN 0-321-48091-0 ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1 and 2 and four characters from Amendment 3 64 99089 Balinese Cuneiform N'Ko Phags-pa and Phoenician added.24 5.1 April 2008 ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1 2 3 and 4 75 100713 Carian Cham Kayah Li Lepcha Lycian Lydian Ol Chiki Rejang Saurashtra Sundanese and Vai added as well as sets of symbols for the Phaistos Disc Mahjong tiles and Domino tiles. There were also important additions for Myanmar additions of letters and Scribal abbreviations used in medieval manuscripts and the addition of capital .25 5.2 October 2009 ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendments 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 90 107361 Avestan Bamum Egyptian hieroglyphs (the Gardiner Set comprising 1071 characters) Imperial Aramaic Inscriptional Pahlavi Inscriptional Parthian Javanese Kaithi Lisu Meetei Mayek Old South Arabian Old Turkic Samaritan Tai Tham and Tai Viet added. 4149 additional CJK Unified Ideographs (CJK-C) as well as extended Jamo for Old Hangul and characters for Vedic Sanskrit.26 6.0 October 2010 ISO/IEC 10646:2010 plus the Indian rupee sign 93 109449 Batak Brahmi Mandaic playing card symbols transport and map symbols alchemical symbols emoticons and emoji.27 Scripts covered Main article: Scripts in Unicode Many modern applications can render a substantial subset of the myriad scripts in Unicode as demonstrated by this screenshot from the OpenOffice.org application. Unicode covers almost all scripts (writing systems) in current use today.28 Although 93 scripts in Unicode are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets abugidas and syllabaries) there are many more scripts yet to be encoded particularly those which are 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 and Ken Whistler) 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 N Shu Tangut and Linear A encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For others scripts such as Mayan 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. The Script Encoding Initiative a project run by Dr. 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.29 Mapping and encodings See also: Mapping of Unicode characters Several mechanisms have been specified for implementing Unicode; which one implementers choose depends on available storage space source code compatibility and interoperability with other systems. Unicode Transformation Format and Universal Character Set Unicode defines two mapping methods: the Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) encodings and the Universal 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. The numbers in the names of the encodings indicate the number of bits in one 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 rather an RFC) UTF-8 an 8-bit variable-width encoding which maximizes compatibility with ASCII. UTF-EBCDIC an 8-bit variable-width encoding which maximizes 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 also used by 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). Some software developers have adopted it for other encodings including UTF-8 so software can distinguish UTF-8 from local 8-bit code pages. In this case it attempts to mark the file as containing Unicode text. 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 no-break space (a character with no appearance and no effect other than preventing the formation of ligatures). Also the units FE and FF never appear in UTF-8. The same character converted to UTF-8 becomes the byte sequence EF BB BF. 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 cases each code point may be represented by a variable number of code values. UTF-32 is widely used as internal representation of text in programs (as opposed to stored or transmitted text) since every Unix operating system which uses the gcc compilers to generate software uses it as the standard "wide character" encoding. 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. 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 character shape that greatly extends the supported glyph repertoire. This covers the use of combining diacritical marks. They are inserted after the main character (one can stack several combining diacritics over 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 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). So in many cases users have many 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 the mechanism for composing hangul syllables with their individual subcomponents known as hangul Jamo. However it also provides all 11172 combinations of precomposed hangul syllables. The CJK ideographs currently have codes only for their precomposed form. Still most of those ideographs comprise simpler elements (often called radicals in English) so in principle Unicode could have decomposed them just as has happened with hangul. This would have greatly reduced the number of required code points while allowing the display of virtually every conceivable ideograph (which might do away with some of the problems caused by the Han unification). A similar idea covers some input methods such as Cangjie and Wubi. However attempts to do this for character encoding have stumbled over the fact that ideographs do not decompose as simply or as regularly as it seems they should. 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 <U+0065 U+0301>. 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 652 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:30 MES-1 (Latin scripts only 335 characters) MES-2 (Latin Greek and Cyrillic 1062 characters)31 and MES-3A & MES-3B (two larger subsets not shown here). Note that MES-2 includes every character in MES-1 and WGL-4. WGL-4 MES-1 and MES-2 Row Cells Range(s) 00 207E Basic Latin (007F) A0FF Latin-1 Supplement (80FF) 01 0013 1415 162B 2C2D 2E4D 4E4F 507E 7F Latin Extended-A (007F) 8F 92 B7 DE-EF FAFF Latin Extended-B (80FF ...) 02 181B 1E1F Latin Extended-B (... 004F) 59 7C 92 IPA Extensions (50AF) BBBD C6 C7 C9 D6 D8DB DC DD DF EE Spacing Modifier Letters (B0FF) 03 7475 7A 7E 848A 8C 8EA1 A3CE D7 DAE1 Greek (70FF) 04 00 010C 0D 0E4F 50 515C 5D 5E5F 9091 92C4 C7C8 CBCC D0EB EEF5 F8F9 Cyrillic (00FF) 1E 0203 0A0B 1E1F 4041 5657 6061 6A6B 8085 9B F2F3 Latin Extended Additional (00FF) 1F 0015 181D 2045 484D 5057 59 5B 5D 5F7D 80B4 B6C4 C6D3 D6DB DDEF F2F4 F6FE Greek Extended (00FF) 20 1314 15 17 1819 1A1B 1C1D 1E 2022 26 30 3233 393A 3C 3E General Punctuation (006F) 44 4A 7F 82 Superscripts and Subscripts (709F) A3A4 A7 AC AF Currency Symbols (A0CF) 21 05 13 16 22 26 2E Letterlike Symbols (004F) 5B5E Number Forms (508F) 9093 9495 A8 Arrows (90FF) 22 00 02 03 06 0809 0F 1112 15 191A 1E1F 2728 29 2A 2B 48 59 6061 6465 8283 95 97 Mathematical Operators (00FF) 23 02 0A 2021 292A Miscellaneous Technical (00FF) 25 00 02 0C 10 14 18 1C 24 2C 34 3C 506C Box Drawing (007F) 80 84 88 8C 9093 Block Elements (809F) A0A1 AAAC B2 BA BC C4 CACB CF D8D9 E6 Geometric Shapes (A0FF) 26 3A3C 40 42 60 63 6566 6A 6B Miscellaneous Symbols (00FF) F0 (0102) Private Use Area (00FF ...) FB 0102 Alphabetic Presentation Forms (004F) 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. The Apple LastResort font will display a substitute glyph indicating the Unicode range of the character and the SIL Unicode fallback font will display a box showing the hexadecimal scalar value of the character. Unicode in use 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 and later moved to UTF-16 (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 and Windows 7) which uses UTF-16 as the sole internal character encoding. The Java and .NET bytecode environments Mac OS X and KDE also use it for internal representation. Unicode is available on Windows 95 (and its descendants Windows 98 and Windows ME) through Microsoft Layer for Unicode. UTF-8 (originally developed for Plan 9)32 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 Mac OS X and Pango for GTK+ and the GNOME desktop. Input methods Main article: Unicode input 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 1475533 which standardises methods for entering Unicode characters from their codepoints specifies several methods. There is the Basic method where a beginning sequence is followed by the hexadecimal representation of the codepoint 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. E-mail Main article: Unicode and e-mail MIME defines two different mechanisms for encoding non-ASCII characters in e-mail depending on whether the characters are in e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail software. The adoption of Unicode in e-mail has been very slow. Some East-Asian text is still encoded in encodings such as ISO-2022 and some devices such as cell telephones still cannot handle Unicode data correctly. Support has been improving however. Many major free mail providers such as Yahoo Google (Gmail) and Microsoft (Hotmail) support it. Web Main article: Unicode and HTML 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. Display problems result primarily from font related issues; in particular versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer do not render many code points unless explicitly told to use a font that contains them.34 Although syntax rules may affect the order in which characters are allowed to appear both HTML 4 and XML (including XHTML) documents by definition comprise characters from most of the Unicode code points with the exception of: most of the C0 and C1 control codes the permanently-unassigned code points D800DFFF any code point ending in 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 &#916; &#1049; &#1511; &#1605; &#3671; &#12354; &#21494; &#33865; and &#47568; (or the same numeric values expressed in hexadecimal with &#x as the prefix) should display on all browsers as and . When specifying URIs for example as URLs in HTTP requests non-ASCII characters must be percent-encoded. Fonts Main article: Unicode typeface 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. Thousands of fonts exist on the market but fewer than a dozen fontssometimes described as "pan-Unicode" fontsattempt 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. New lines Unicode partially addresses the new line 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 new line Unicode did introduce 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 new line 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 new line character is converted internally to a common new line (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 new line 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 Rapporteur Group (IRG) which advises the Consortium and ISO on additions to the repertoire and on Han unification.35 Unicode has been criticized for failing to allow for 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). This leads to the perception that the languages themselves not just the basic character representation are being merged.36clarification needed 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. Among them are TRON (although it is not widely adopted in Japan there are some users who need to handle historical Japanese text and favor it) and UTF-2000. Although the repertoire of fewer than 21000 Han characters in the earliest version of Unicode was largely limited to characters in common modern usage Unicode now includes more than 70000 Han characters and work is continuing to add thousands more historic and dialectal characters used in China Japan Korea and Vietnam. Mapping to legacy character sets 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 201 '' (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).37 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.38 (This encoding also replaces tilde '' 0x7E with overline '' now 0xAF.) The separation of these characters exists in ISO 8859-1 from long before Unicode. Indic scripts Thai alphabet support has been criticized for its illogical ordering of Thai characters. The vowels 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.36 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 sa d "view" starts with a consonant cluster "" (with an inherent vowel for the consonant "") the vowel - in spoken order would come after the but in a dictionary the word is collated as it is written with the vowel following the . 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 out of components. Some local scholars argued in favor of assignments of Unicode codepoints to these ligatures going against the practice for other writing systems though Unicode contains some Arabic and other ligatures for backward compatibility purposes only.394041 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 Tibetan script (citation neededthe Chinese National Standard organization failed to achieve a similar change). Combining characters Main article: Combining character 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 (precomposed e with macron and acute above) and e (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. See also Unicode input Comparison of Unicode encodings Free software Unicode typefaces List of binary codes List of Unicode characters organized by code point List of Unicode characters organized by script List of XML and HTML character entity references Standards related to Unicode Unicode symbols Cultural political and religious symbols in Unicode Notes "The Unicode Standard: A Technical Introduction". http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html#. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Summary Narrative". http://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html. Retrieved 2010-03-15.  Sammet Jean E. (1969). Programming languages: history and fundamentals. Prentice-Hall. p. 137.  "Unicode.": The Universal Telegraphic Phrase-Book (6th ed.). London: Cassel & Company. 1889. OCLC 67882848. http://www.archive.org/details/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog.  a b c Becker Joseph D. (August 29 1988). "Unicode 88". http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf.  "Glossary of Unicode Terms". http://unicode.org/glossary/. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  a b "Unicode Character Encoding Stability Policy". http://unicode.org/policies/stabilitypolicy.html. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Properties". http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch03.pdf#G43463. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Character Encoding Model". http://unicode.org/reports/tr17/. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Named Sequences". http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamedSequences.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Name Aliases". http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NameAliases.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "The Unicode Consortium Members". http://www.unicode.org/consortium/memblogo.html. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". http://www.unicode.org/versions/enumeratedversions.html. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Date". http://www.unicode.org/Public/reconstructed/1.0.0/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data 1.0.1". http://www.unicode.org/Public/reconstructed/1.0.1/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data 1995". http://www.unicode.org/Public/1.1-Update/UnicodeData-1.1.5.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-2.0.14". http://www.unicode.org/Public/2.0-Update/UnicodeData-2.0.14.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-2.1.2". http://www.unicode.org/Public/2.1-Update/UnicodeData-2.1.2.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-3.0.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.0-Update/UnicodeData-3.0.0.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-3.1.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.1-Update/UnicodeData-3.1.0.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-3.2.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.2-Update/UnicodeData-3.2.0.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data-4.0.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.0-Update/UnicodeData-4.0.0.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data". http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.1.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-16.  "Unicode Data 5.0.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-17.  "Unicode Data 5.1.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-17.  "Unicode Data 5.2.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-03-17.  "Unicode Data 6.0.0". http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt. Retrieved 2010-10-11.  "Character Code Charts". http://www.unicode.org/charts/. Retrieved 2010-03-17.  About The Script Encoding Initiative CWA 13873:2000  Multilingual European Subsets in ISO/IEC 10646-1 CEN Workshop Agreement 13873 Multilingual European Character Set 2 (MES-2) Rationale Markus Kuhn 1998 Pike Rob (2003-04-30). "UTF-8 history". http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt.  ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 18/WG 9 N Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5 5.5 and 6 for Multilingual and Unicode Support A Brief History of Character Codes Steven J. Searle originally written 1999 last updated 2004 a b The secret life of Unicode: A peek at Unicode's soft underbelly Suzanne Topping 1 May 2001 AFII contribution about WAVE DASH Unicode vendor-specific character table for Japanese ISO 646-* Problem Section 4.4.3.5 of Introduction to I18n Tomohiro KUBOTA 2001 "Arabic Presentation Forms-A". http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFB50.pdf. Retrieved 2010-03-20.  "Arabic Presentation Forms-B". http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFE70.pdf. Retrieved 2010-03-20.  "Alphabetic Presentation Forms". http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFB00.pdf. Retrieved 2010-03-20.  References The Complete Manual of Typography James Felici Adobe Press; 1st edition 2002. ISBN 0-321-12730-7 The Unicode Standard Version 4.0 The Unicode Consortium Addison-Wesley Professional 27 August 2003. ISBN 0-321-18578-1 The Unicode Standard Version 5.0 Fifth Edition The Unicode Consortium Addison-Wesley Professional 27 October 2006. ISBN 0-321-48091-0 Unicode: A Primer Tony Graham M&T books 2000. ISBN 0-7645-4625-2. Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard Richard Gillam Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition 2002. ISBN 0-201-70052-2 Unicode Explained Jukka K. Korpela O'Reilly; 1st edition 2006. ISBN 0-596-10121-X External links Find more about Unicode on Wikipedia's sister projects: Definitions from Wiktionary Images and media from Commons Learning resources from Wikiversity News stories from Wikinews Quotations from Wikiquote Source texts from Wikisource Textbooks from Wikibooks The Unicode Consortium Unicode 6.0.0 the complete Unicode standard Character Code Charts By Script for Unicode 6.0 Alan Wood's Unicode Resources Contains lists of word processors with Unicode capability; fonts and characters are grouped by type; characters are presented in lists not grids. Tim Bray's Characters vs Bytes explains how the different encodings work. decodeunicode.org images of all 98884 graphic characters defined in Unicode 5.0 (German/English full text search) libUniCode-plus (Creation and manipulation of Unicode tables) Table of Unicode characters from 1 to 65535 (alternative tables: 64 symbols per page and 100 symbols per page) Unicode Character Search (search for characters by their Unicode names) UniView An XHTML-based Unicode character look up application YChartUnicode Yoix chart of all Code Points in the Basic Multilingual Plane Bill Poser's Unicode linguistic explanation and a list of Escape Formats Joel Spolsky's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets v d eUnicode Unicode Unicode Consortium  ISO/IEC 10646 (Universal Character Set) Code points Code point  Plane  Block  Mapping characters  Character property  Character charts Characters Special purpose BOM  Combining grapheme joiner  Left-to-right mark and Right-to-left mark  Zero-width non-breaking space  Zero-width joiner  Zero-width non-joiner  Zero-width space Miscellaneous lists Combining character  Duplicate characters  Graphic characters Processing Algorithms Bi-directional text  Collation (ISO 14651)  Equivalence Transformation BOCU-1  CESU-8  UTF-1  UTF-7  UTF-8  UTF-9/UTF-18  UTF-16/UCS-2  UTF-32/UCS-4  UTF-EBCDIC  Punycode  SCSU  Comparison On pairs of code points Equivalence  Combining character  Duplicates  Homoglyph  Precomposed character (List)  Compatibility characters  Z-variant Usage Unicode and e-mail  Unicode and HTML  Character entity references  Unicode input  Internationalized domain name  Numeric character reference  Private Use U+F8FF  Typefaces (fonts)  Script (Unicode) Related standards Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)  GB 18030  Han unification  ISO/IEC 8859 (8-bit encodings)  ISO 14651 (Collation)  ISO 15924 (Script codes) Related topics Anomalies  ConScript Unicode Registry  Ideographic Rapporteur Group  International Components for Unicode  MUFI  People related to Unicode  Scripts and symbols in Unicode Common and inherited scripts Combining marks  Diacritics  Punctuation  Space Modern scripts Arabic (diacritics  Unicode blocks)  Armenian  Balinese  Batak  Bamum  Bengali  Bopomofo  Braille  Buginese  Buhid  Canadian Aboriginal  Cham  Cherokee  CJK Unified Ideographs (Han)  Cyrillic  Deseret  Devanagari  Ethiopic  Georgian  Greek  Gujarati  Gurmukhi  Kanji  Hanja  Hn t  Hangul  Hanunoo  Hebrew (diacritics)  Hiragana  Javanese  Kannada  Katakana  Kayah Li  Khmer  Lao  Latin  Lepcha  Limbu  Lisu  Malayalam  Mandaic  Meetei Mayek  Mongolian  Manchu  Myanmar  N'Ko  New Tai Lue  Ol Chiki  Oriya  Osmanya  Rejang  Samaritan  Saurashtra  Shavian  Sinhala  Sundanese  Syloti Nagri  Syriac  Tagalog  Tagbanwa  Tai Le  Tai Tham  Tai Viet  Tamil  Telugu  Thaana  Thai  Tibetan  Tifinagh  Vai  Yi Ancient and historic scripts Avestan  Brhm  Carian  Coptic  Sumero-Akkadian  Cypriot  Egyptian Hieroglyphs  Glagolitic  Gothic  Imperial Aramaic  Inscriptional Pahlavi  Inscriptional Parthian  Kaithi  Kharoshthi  Linear B  Lycian  Lydian  Ogham  Old Italic  Old Persian  Phags-pa  Phoenician  Old South Arabian  Old Turkic  Runic  Ugaritic Symbols Cultural political and religious symbols  Currency  Mathematical operators and symbols  Phonetic symbols (including IPA) v d eCharacter encodings Character sets Early telecommunications ASCII  ISO/IEC 646  ISO/IEC 6937  T.61  sixbit code pages  Baudot code  Morse code ISO/IEC 8859 -1  -2  -3  -4  -5  -6  -7  -8  -9  -10  -11  -12  -13  -14  -15  -16 Bibliographic use ANSEL  ISO 5426 / 5426-2 / 5427 / 5428 / 6438 / 6861 / 6862 / 10585 / 10586 / 10754 / 11822  MARC-8 National standards ArmSCII  CNS 11643  GOST 10859  GB 2312  HKSCS  ISCII  JIS X 0201  JIS X 0208  JIS X 0212  JIS X 0213  KPS 9566  KS X 1001  PASCII  TIS-620  TSCII  VISCII  YUSCII EUC CN  JP  KR  TW ISO/IEC 2022 CN  JP  KR  CCCII MacOS codepages ("scripts") Arabic  CentralEurRoman  ChineseSimp / EUC-CN  ChineseTrad / Big5  Croatian  Cyrillic  Devanagari  Dingbats  Farsi  Greek  Gujarati  Gurmukhi  Hebrew  Icelandic  Japanese / ShiftJIS  Korean / EUC-KR  Roman  Romanian  Symbol  Thai / TIS-620  Turkish  Ukrainian DOS codepages 437  720  737  775  850  852  855  857  858  860  861  862  863  864  865  866  869  Kamenick  Mazovia  MIK  Iran System Windows codepages 874 / TIS-620  932 / ShiftJIS  936 / GBK  949 / EUC-KR  950 / Big5  1250  1251  1252  1253  1254  1255  1256  1257  1258  1361  54936 / GB18030 EBCDIC codepages 37/1140  273/1141  277/1142  278/1143  280/1144  284/1145  285/1146  297/1147  420/16804  424/12712  500/1148  838/1160  871/1149  875/9067  930/1390  933/1364  937/1371  935/1388  939/1399  1025/1154  1026/1155  1047/924  1112/1156  1122/1157  1123/1158  1130/1164  JEF  KEIS Platform specific ATASCII  CDC display code  DEC-MCS  DEC Radix-50  Fieldata  GSM 03.38  HP roman8  PETSCII  TI calculator character sets  ZX Spectrum character set Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646 UTF-8  UTF-16/UCS-2  UTF-32/UCS-4  UTF-7  UTF-1  UTF-EBCDIC  GB 18030  SCSU  BOCU-1 Miscellaneous codepages APL  Cork  HZ  IBM code page 1133  KOI8  TRON Related topics control character (C0 C1)  CCSID  Character encodings in HTML  charset detection  Han unification  ISO 6429/IEC 6429/ANSI X3.64  mojibake