The Unicode® Standard

Unicode is a computing standard for the consistent encoding symbols. It was created in 1991. It’s just a table, which shows glyphs position to encoding system. Encoding takes symbol from table, and tells font what should paint. But computer can understand binary code only. So, encoding is used to represent characters by number 1 and 0. (Like In Morse code dots and dashes represents letters and digits). Each number (1 or 0) is calling bit. 8 bits is byte. Most known and often used Unicode coding is UTF-8. It needs 1 or 4 bytes to represent each symbol. Older coding types takes only 1 byte, so they can’t contains enough glyphs to supply more than one language.

Symbols

Each Unicode character has its own number and HTML-code. Example: Cyrillic small letter hard sign has number U+044A (044A – it is hexadecimal number), code ъ. In a table, letter hard sign located at intersection line no. 0440 and column A. If you want to know number of some symbol, you may found it in a table or paste it to the search string or search by description (… some “Cyrillic sign” may be “letter”… I don’t remember). On symbols page you can see how it is looking like in different fonts. Also, you may copy this symbol to paste it to Word or Facebook. Also, there are several set on this site for more comfortable coping.

Unicode table includes a lot characters of different languages. Almost all writing systems using these days represent. Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, hieroglyphs, pictographic. Letters, digits, punctuation. Also Unicode standard covers a lot of dead scripts (abugidas, syllabaries) with the historical purpose. Many other symbols, which are not belong specific writing system coded too. Arrows, stars, control characters etc. All humanity needs too to produce to quality text.

Unicode standard doesn’t freeze, it continues to evolve. In June 2015 was released version 8.0. More than 120 thousands characters coded for now. The Consortium does not create new symbols, just add often used. Faces (emoji) included because it was often used by Japanese mobile operators. But some does not containing a matter of principle. There are not trademarks in Unicode table, even Windows flag or fruit of Apple.