Unicode Explained

accustomed to using, for example, the ASCII quotation mark " instead of proper

quotation marks. We can often include ASCII special characters like *, due to their

wide availability, even though they are not common in ordinary texts.

Commonly used other characters

These are less common characters that can be regarded as belonging to the language

in the broad sense, such as é due to its occurrence in words of French origin, @

due to its appearance in the Internet context as well as in unit price indications,

and the ellipsis, “…”. Most of these characters can be replaced by the use of core

characters, with some loss in typography and style. (For example, “e” could be

used for é, and three period characters “...” could be used instead of the ellipsis

“…”.)

Additional characters in foreign words and names from “neighboring” languages

These are characters that belong to other languages but appear relatively often due

to cultural connections. In English, it is not uncommon to use loanwords and

names taken directly from French, Spanish, and German, for example. Therefore,

characters like è, ñ, and ü are often needed in English texts. Their relevance depends

on the nature of the text as well as cultural context. Typically, these characters are

letters with diacritic marks, and the marks can usually be omitted without making

the text incomprehensible, but it is regarded as good style to preserve them. ...