Unicode Explained

There is no simple cure for the problem. We need to be cautious, and we need to explain

the special characters, as well as special notations, that we use. Unicode lets you use a

huge number of characters, but most people understand just a small subset.

Although the understandability of characters and the technical possibilities of render-

ing them are quite different aspects, they are interconnected in practice. If you use

technically “safe” characters such as ASCII characters only, for example, the odds are

that people understand the characters and that specialized software, like Braille devices,

can handle them well. People and programs understand the “safe” characters because

they are widely used in computers. Even if they don’t know exactly what you mean by

an asterisk, *, the character probably looks familiar to them. If you use a more fancy

star-shaped Unicode character, like the black star ★ (U+2605), in your text, it will not

work technically in all circumstances, and it may make people wonder whether it is a

typo or something. Therefore, make sure you have a good reason to take these risks.

Explaining characters

When you use characters that are not widely known to your audience, you should try

to explain them. Usually the explanations should be presented in normal textual con-

tent, perhaps in the copy text, perhaps in footnotes or some other way; the choice

depends on how important ...