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 be painted. But computer can understand binary code only. So, encoding is used number 1 or 0 to represent characters. Like In Morse code dots and dashes represents letters and digits. Each unit (1 or 0) is calling bit. 16 bits is two byte. Most known and often used 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.

Unicode symbols

Each Unicode character has its own number and HTML-code. Example: Cyrillic capital letter Э has number U+042D (042D – it is hexadecimal number), code ъ. In a table, letter Э located at intersection line no. 0420 and column D. If you want to know number of some Unicode symbol, you may found it in a table. Or paste it to the search string. Or search by description («Cyrillic letter E»). On the symbol page you can see how it's looking like in different fonts and operating systems. You may copy this and paste it to Word or Facebook. Also, there are several character sets on this site for more comfortable coping.

Different part of the 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. It's arrows, stars, control characters etc. All humanity needs to produce high-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 units does not containing a matter of principle. There are not trademarks in Unicode table, even Windows flag or registered trademark of apple.