Unicode Explained

Different workarounds

Independently of the nature of the limitation that you need to overcome, there are three

basic ways to use a character outside the available repertoire:

• Design a font that contains a glyph for the character, and encode the character

using a Private Use code point in Unicode.

• Create an image that represents the character, and embed the image into text.

• Represent the entire paragraph or block of text as an image, and insert it between

normal text blocks.

The first approach can work only in an environment where you can control font usage.

The approach as such does not violate Unicode principles, if you use the Private Use

area instead of code points allocated to characters in the Unicode standard. Naturally,

the approach would depend on “private agreement,” and texts using it would not be

portable across systems and applications.

The second approach has mostly been used in situations where the character repertoire

is limited by practical constraints that do not allow the use of full Unicode. You can

still find web pages that represent special characters as images, since authors do not

know about Unicode, or since they estimate that the characters are not widely enough

available on users’ systems. Thus, a character like black spade suit ♠ (U+2660) might

be represented using a tag for image embedding, <img src="spade.gif"

alt="spades">, rather than the character