Unicode Explained

Registered sign® (U+00AE) consists of letter R in a circle. It is written after a name or

other expression to indicate it as a registered trademark (at least in some country).

There is considerable variation in glyphs for this character. The letter R inside the circle

may have different shapes, but in addition to that, the size and position may vary. For

example, in the Lucida Sans Unicode font, ® is a small superscript, whereas in Verdana,

® extends below baseline (making the R in the symbol line up with the baseline), and

the symbol is relatively large.

Section sign § (U+00A7) is used as a section sign especially in the U.S., and as a

paragraph sign in some European usage, especially when referring to paragraphs in

laws, contracts, rules, etc. For that reason, § is often used to symbolize law in general.

Reflecting the variation, the character is called paragraph sign in many standards.

Other Latin Letters

The Latin-1 Supplement covers most languages spoken in Western and Northern Eu-

rope. There are many other languages that use a script based on Latin letters. The ISO

8859 set of standards contains various sets of 8-bit codes with different upper halves

that cover some of those languages. In Unicode, however, the structure is different. It

has:

• Latin Extended-A block (U+0100..U+017F), which contains a large set of Latin

letters with diacritic marks as well as some additional letters. ...