Fonts & Encodings

3.7. Reading a Unicode block

On pages 121 and 122, we have reproduced (with the kind permission of the Unicode Consortium given to us by Lisa Moore) two pages of the Unicode book [335]. They are for the "Latin Extended-A" block, which contains Latin characters too exotic to be included in ISO 8859-1 but not bizarre enough to be in "Latin Extended-B".

The page that illustrates the block's layout needs no explanation: under each representative glyph, there is the hexadecimal code for the corresponding Unicode character. The representative glyphs are set in the same Times-style font as the body text. In this table, we find four characters that are familiar to us for having been omitted from ISO 8859-1: 'Œ and 'œ' (0x0152 and 0x0153), 'Ÿ' (0x0178), and '' (0x017F) (the long "s").

Let us now examine the list of character descriptions, page 122. The title "European Latin" in bold Helvetica is a subdivision of the table according to the characters' purpose; in this case, it is the only subdivision.

For each character, we have information listed in three columns: the first column contains the character's code point in hexadecimal, the second shows the representative glyph, and the third contains the name and a certain number of other details.

The character name is written in capitals: "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON". This name is definitive and may not be changed for all of eternity. ...