Unicode Demystified

Character Semantics

Because Unicode aims to encode semantics rather than appearances, simple code charts aren't sufficient. After all, they merely show pictures of characters in a grid that maps them to numeric values. The pictures of the characters can certainly help illustrate the semantics of the characters, but they can't tell the whole story. The Unicode standard goes well beyond just pictures of the characters, providing a wealth of information on every character.

Every code chart in the standard is followed by a list of the characters in the code chart. For each character, an entry gives the following information:

• Its Unicode code point value.

• A representative glyph. For characters that combine with other characters, such as accent marks, ...