Unicode Demystified

Ideographic Description Sequences

With more than 70,000 characters, it hardly seems likely that any more would be necessary. In fact, the Han characters are an open-ended set, with more being created every day (a common source, for example, is proud parents wanting to give their children unique names). As if that trend weren't enough, not all of the variant forms of the characters have separate encodings. When big differences exist, they do; as we saw earlier, however, smaller differences that can be attributed to font design are unified. The problem is that many situations involve definite regional preferences for particular font designs, meaning that it can sometimes be difficult to get precisely the glyph you want, even when the character ...