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46-484: Old Sogdian is a Unicode block containing characters for a group of related, non-cursive Sogdian writing systems used to write historic Sogdian in the 3rd to 5th centuries CE. The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Old Sogdian block: There is a Unicode font encoding Old Sogdian - Noto Sans Old Sogdian . Unicode block Each block

92-498: A block is always a multiple of 16, and is often a multiple of 128, but is otherwise arbitrary. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over several different, potentially disjunct blocks within the codespace. Each code point is assigned a classification, listed as the code point's General Category property. Here, at the uppermost level code points are categorized as one of Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator, or Other. Under each category, each code point

138-727: A calendar year and with rare cases where the scheduled release had to be postponed. For instance, in April 2020, a month after version 13.0 was published, the Unicode Consortium announced they had changed the intended release date for version 14.0, pushing it back six months to September 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Unicode 16.0, the latest version, was released on 10 September 2024. It added 5,185 characters and seven new scripts: Garay , Gurung Khema , Kirat Rai , Ol Onal , Sunuwar , Todhri , and Tulu-Tigalari . Thus far,

184-1833: A character, once assigned, may not be moved or removed, although it may be deprecated. This applies to Unicode 2.0 and all subsequent versions. Prior to this, the following former blocks were moved: 0000–​0FFF 1000–​1FFF 2000–​2FFF 3000–​3FFF 4000–​4FFF 5000–​5FFF 6000–​6FFF 7000–​7FFF 8000–​8FFF 9000–​9FFF A000–​AFFF B000–​BFFF C000–​CFFF D000–​DFFF E000–​EFFF F000–​FFFF 10000–​10FFF 11000–​11FFF 12000–​12FFF 13000–​13FFF 14000–​14FFF 16000–​16FFF 17000–​17FFF 18000–​18FFF 1A000–​1AFFF 1B000–​1BFFF 1C000–​1CFFF 1D000–​1DFFF 1E000–​1EFFF 1F000–​1FFFF 20000–​20FFF 21000–​21FFF 22000–​22FFF 23000–​23FFF 24000–​24FFF 25000–​25FFF 26000–​26FFF 27000–​27FFF 28000–​28FFF 29000–​29FFF 2A000–​2AFFF 2B000–​2BFFF 2C000–​2CFFF 2D000–​2DFFF 2E000–​2EFFF 2F000–​2FFFF 30000–​30FFF 31000–​31FFF 32000–​32FFF E0000–​E0FFF 15: SPUA-A F0000–​FFFFF 16: SPUA-B 100000–​10FFFF Unicode Unicode , formally The Unicode Standard ,

230-432: A comprehensive catalog of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text , as well as visual charts and reference data sets to aid implementers. Previously, The Unicode Standard was sold as a print volume containing the complete core specification, standard annexes, and code charts. However, version 5.0, published in 2006, was the last version printed this way. Starting with version 5.2, only

276-402: A diacritic for the preceding glyph). This division is completely independent of code blocks: the code points with a given General Category generally span many blocks, and do not have to be consecutive, not even within each block. Each code point also has a script property , specifying which writing system it is intended for, or whether it is intended for multiple writing systems. This, also,

322-487: A filler to this block given that it has been agreed that no further Arabic compatibility characters will be encoded. Each Unicode point also has a property called " General Category ", that attempts to describe the role of the corresponding symbol in the languages or applications for whose sake it was included in the system. Examples of General Categories are "Lu" (meaning upper-case letter), "Nd" (decimal digit), "Pi" (open-quote punctuation), and "Mn" (non-spacing mark, i.e.

368-575: A full semantic duplicate of the Latin alphabet, because legacy CJK encodings contained both "fullwidth" (matching the width of CJK characters) and "halfwidth" (matching ordinary Latin script) characters. The Unicode Bulldog Award is given to people deemed to be influential in Unicode's development, with recipients including Tatsuo Kobayashi , Thomas Milo, Roozbeh Pournader , Ken Lunde , and Michael Everson . The origins of Unicode can be traced back to

414-417: A glyph property called "Block", whose value is a character string naming the unique block that owns that point. However, a block may also contain unassigned code points, usually reserved for future additions of characters that "logically" should belong to that block. Code points not belonging to any of the named blocks, e.g. in the unassigned planes 4–13, have the value block="No_Block". Simply belonging to

460-429: A handful of scripts—often primarily between a given script and Latin characters —not between a large number of scripts, and not with all of the scripts supported being treated in a consistent manner. The philosophy that underpins Unicode seeks to encode the underlying characters— graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than graphical distinctions considered mere variant glyphs thereof, that are instead best handled by

506-534: A low-surrogate code point forms a surrogate pair in UTF-16 in order to represent code points greater than U+FFFF . In principle, these code points cannot otherwise be used, though in practice this rule is often ignored, especially when not using UTF-16. A small set of code points are guaranteed never to be assigned to characters, although third-parties may make independent use of them at their discretion. There are 66 of these noncharacters : U+FDD0 – U+FDEF and

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552-696: A particular Unicode block does not guarantee the certain particular properties of the characters it is or will be expected to contain. The identity of any character is determined by its properties stated in the Unicode Character Database. For example, the contiguous range of 32 noncharacter code points U+FDD0..U+FDEF share none of the properties common to the other characters in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, that they are certainly not Arabic script characters or "right-to-left noncharacters", and are assigned there as

598-535: 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. The Unicode Consortium together with the ISO have developed a shared repertoire following the initial publication of The Unicode Standard : Unicode and

644-399: A properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose. This design decision was made based on the assumption that only scripts and characters in "modern" use would require encoding: 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

690-558: A total of 168 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

736-654: A universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned. Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development. Full members include most of the main computer software and hardware companies (and few others) with any interest in text-processing standards, including Adobe , Apple , Google , IBM , Meta (previously as Facebook), Microsoft , Netflix , and SAP . Over

782-483: Is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of the standard defines 154 998 characters and 168 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within

828-497: Is generally, but not always, meant to supply glyphs used by one or more specific languages, or in some general application area such as mathematics , surveying , decorative typesetting , social forums, etc. Unicode blocks are identified by unique names, which use only ASCII characters and are usually descriptive of the nature of the symbols, in English ; such as "Tibetan" or "Supplemental Arrows-A". (When comparing block names, one

874-541: Is independent of block. In descriptions of the Unicode system, a block may be subdivided into more specific subgroups, such as the " Chess symbols " in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (not to be confused with the separate Chess Symbols block). Those subgroups are not "blocks" in the technical sense used by the Unicode consortium, and are named only for the convenience of users. Unicode 16.0 defines 338 blocks: The Unicode Stability Policy requires that

920-413: Is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding". In this document, entitled Unicode 88 , Becker outlined a scheme using 16-bit characters: 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

966-428: Is more than just a repertoire within which characters are assigned. To aid developers and designers, the standard also provides charts and reference data, as well as annexes explaining concepts germane to various scripts, providing guidance for their implementation. Topics covered by these annexes include character normalization , character composition and decomposition, collation , and directionality . Unicode text

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1012-457: Is not padded. There are a total of 2 + (2 − 2 ) = 1 112 064 valid code points within the codespace. (This number arises from the limitations of the UTF-16 character encoding, which can encode the 2 code points in the range U+0000 through U+FFFF except for the 2 code points in the range U+D800 through U+DFFF , which are used as surrogate pairs to encode the 2 code points in

1058-417: Is processed and stored as binary data using one of several encodings , which define how to translate the standard's abstracted codes for characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode Standard itself defines three encodings: UTF-8 , UTF-16 , and UTF-32 , though several others exist. Of these, UTF-8 is the most widely used by a large margin, in part due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII . Unicode

1104-480: Is projected to include 4301 new unified CJK characters . The Unicode Standard defines a codespace : a sequence of integers called code points in the range from 0 to 1 114 111 , notated according to the standard as U+0000 – U+10FFFF . The codespace is a systematic, architecture-independent representation of The Unicode Standard ; actual text is processed as binary data via one of several Unicode encodings, such as UTF-8 . In this normative notation,

1150-404: Is supposed to equate uppercase with lowercase letters, and ignore any whitespace, hyphens, and underbars; so the last name is equivalent to "supplemental_arrows__a" and "SUPPLEMENTALARROWSA". Blocks are pairwise disjoint ; that is, they do not overlap. The starting code point and the size (number of code points) of each block are always multiples of 16; therefore, in the hexadecimal notation,

1196-400: Is then further subcategorized. In most cases, other properties must be used to adequately describe all the characteristics of any given code point. The 1024 points in the range U+D800 – U+DBFF 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 followed by

1242-571: The typeface , through the use of markup , or by some other means. In particularly complex cases, such as the treatment of orthographical variants in Han characters , there is considerable disagreement regarding which differences justify their own encodings, and which are only graphical variants of other characters. At the most abstract level, Unicode assigns a unique number called a code point to each character. Many issues of visual representation—including size, shape, and style—are intended to be up to

1288-578: The 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to Xerox 's Character Code Standard (XCCS). In 1987, Xerox employee Joe Becker , along with Apple employees Lee Collins and Mark Davis , started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. With additional input from Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad , Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode'

1334-567: The ISO's Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) use identical character names and code points. However, the Unicode versions do differ from their ISO equivalents in two significant ways. While the UCS is a simple character map, Unicode specifies the rules, algorithms, and properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. Thus, The Unicode Standard includes more information, covering in-depth topics such as bitwise encoding, collation , and rendering. It also provides

1380-496: The core specification, published as a print-on-demand paperback, may be purchased. The full text, on the other hand, is published as a free PDF on the Unicode website. A practical reason for this publication method highlights the second significant difference between the UCS and Unicode—the frequency with which updated versions are released and new characters added. The Unicode Standard has regularly released annual expanded versions, occasionally with more than one version released in

1426-475: The discretion of the software actually rendering the text, such as a web browser or word processor . However, partially with the intent of encouraging rapid adoption, the simplicity of this original model has become somewhat more elaborate over time, and various pragmatic concessions have been made over the course of the standard's development. The first 256 code points mirror the ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard, with

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1472-401: The following 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") and are omitted in the table below. The Unicode Consortium normally releases a new version of The Unicode Standard once a year. Version 17.0, the next major version,

1518-526: The group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing 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 the first volume of The Unicode Standard was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992. In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism

1564-562: The intent of trivializing the conversion of text already written in Western European scripts. To preserve the distinctions made by different legacy encodings, therefore allowing for conversion between them and Unicode without any loss of information, many characters nearly identical to others , in both appearance and intended function, were given distinct code points. For example, the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block encompasses

1610-403: The last two code points in each of the 17 planes (e.g. 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

1656-637: 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 website. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen and Khitan large script , encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For other scripts, such as Numidian and Rongorongo , no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character repertoire and other details from

1702-675: The modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2 = 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 Unicode. In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of Research Libraries Group , and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems . In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of Microsoft and NeXT 's Rick McGowan had also joined

1748-559: The previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets , each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages , and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646 , each being code-for-code identical with one another. However, The Unicode Standard

1794-828: The range U+10000 through U+10FFFF .) The Unicode codespace is divided into 17 planes , numbered 0 to 16. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), and contains the most commonly used characters. 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 (the 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. The size of

1840-499: The standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes 3790 emoji , with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as a part of the standard. Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters. Unicode has largely supplanted

1886-450: The starting (smallest) point is U+ xxx 0 and the ending (largest) point is U+ yyy F, where xxx and yyy are three or more hexadecimal digits. (These constraints are intended to simplify the display of glyphs in Unicode Consortium documents, as tables with 16 rows labeled with the last hexadecimal digit of the code point. ) The size of a block may range from the minimum of 16 to a maximum of 65,536 code points. Every assigned code point has

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1932-418: The two-character prefix U+ always precedes a written code point, and the code points themselves are written as hexadecimal numbers. At least four hexadecimal digits are always written, with leading zeros prepended as needed. For example, the code point U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN is padded with two leading zeros, but U+13254 𓉔 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH O004 ( [REDACTED] )

1978-618: 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 Areas code assignments. There is also a Medieval Unicode Font Initiative focused on special Latin medieval characters. Part of these proposals has been already included in Unicode. The Script Encoding Initiative,

2024-640: The years several countries or government agencies have been members of the Unicode Consortium. Presently only the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (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. Unicode currently covers most major writing systems in use today. As of 2024 ,

2070-491: 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, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs , and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used CJK characters—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for

2116-483: Was originally designed with the intent of transcending limitations present in all text encodings designed up to that point: each encoding was relied upon for use in its own context, but with no particular expectation of compatibility with any other. Indeed, any two encodings chosen were often totally unworkable when used together, with text encoded in one interpreted as garbage characters by the other. Most encodings had only been designed to facilitate interoperation between

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