Unicode Explained

multilingual contexts and in simple mathematical and technical texts that need

special symbols, try to restrict the repertoire to the Minimum European Subset 2

(MES‑2). As a more practical criterion, use characters in the Windows Glyph List

4 (WGL 4), which is what the most common fonts cover, more or less.

• For text-processing and publishing purposes, try to identify and document in ad-

vance the set of characters you will need, and test how the relevant software can

handle it. This will help you in identifying the fonts that can be used.

ASCII (Basic Latin)

In Chapter 3, we briefly described the ASCII characters and their encoding. Here we

go into the details of the meanings of these characters. For technical reasons, ASCII

characters are widely used even when more appropriate characters exist in Unicode.

This is partly caused by the history, partly by the fact that ASCII characters are well-

known and easy to type and process, and they work reliably across platforms. But this

implies that many of the characters have multiple uses or, to put it in other words,

multiple semantics.

In the Unicode framework, ASCII characters constitute the very first block of Unicode,

called Basic Latin and ranging from U+0000 to U+007E.

Names of ASCII Characters

The names of ASCII characters have a long history, and they can be rather misleading.

For example, " (U+0022) is called “quotation mark,” although it ...