225
votes
Accepted
Why shouldn’t I use Unicode characters to simulate typographic styles (such as small caps or script)?
General
Those characters are not intended for regular Latin-alphabet text but for phonetics, Cyrillic-alphabet text, for use as mathematical symbols (representing variables), or similar. The only ...
- 2,752
196
votes
Impossible to put a zero after an aleph?
Aleph (U+05D0) is a Hebrew letter, and Hebrew is written right-to-left, so Unicode assigns it the "Right-to-Left" bidirectional class. (See Unicode TR9: Bidirectional Algorithm for more details.)
...
- 407k
144
votes
Accepted
How do these icons work: 🌍🌎🌏✅️?
These characters are emojis that are recognized by the Unicode standards which defines what each character presents.
The exact look for them is different for each OS, and each application, but all ...
- 5,440
110
votes
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Impossible to put a zero after an aleph?
'א', 'HEBREW LETTER ALEF' (U+05D0) has the BIDI (bi-directional) class "Right-to-Left [R]", because Hebrew is traditionally written right-to-left. Digits, on the other hand, have no specific ...
- 1,430
108
votes
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How can I display the (U+F8FF, Apple logo) character on Windows?
In Firefox, the character appears in a box with the hexadecimal characters F8FF. U+F8FF is a private-use character code point, intended for specific applications that need to display specialized ...
- 45.4k
86
votes
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Is there a unicode character for the Windows key?
For non-techies on Facebook, use workaround seen on Wikipedia: ⊞ Win.
Since you want to display the character on the Facebook where you have no control over fonts and there is no such character in ...
- 12.8k
82
votes
How do I debug an emoticon-based URL?
In this case, the domain is "🍕💩.ws" (xn--vi8hiv.ws). This is a free link "shortener" that can turn any link into emojis.
It's free and available at http://linkmoji.parseapp.com
In this case, the ...
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75
votes
How do these icons work: 🌍🌎🌏✅️?
Firefox is using a special font for these emoji characters. It's employing a relatively new and otherwise rarely used feature of TrueType fonts: layered colour glyphs. Other than that (i.e. having a ...
- 846
71
votes
Accepted
What is this character: '*'?
The paste failed not because of the asterisk, which is a perfectly regular asterisk, but because of the Unicode character U+200B. As the character is a ZERO WIDTH SPACE, it does not display when it is ...
- 1,132
69
votes
Why shouldn’t I use Unicode characters to simulate typographic styles (such as small caps or script)?
What can go wrong? Well, I see this:
in Firefox 50.1.0 on Windows 7.
The problem of missing glyphs, in this case on a mobile device, is further illustrated in an image given by user Chris Kent in a ...
- 2,824
60
votes
How to type the Euro Symbol € on US English keyboard in Windows 10 without a numpad or "AltGr" key?
Yes there is!
You can find all kinds of symbols, including the euro symbol, on the Emoji picker.
Go to where you want to enter the symbol
Hit WIN+. or WIN+; on your keyboard
Navigate to the Symbols ...
- 2,604
59
votes
Accepted
Difference Between Unicode FRACTION SLASH and DIVISION SLASH
The difference between the two is semantic:
DIVISION SLASH is in the mathematical operators block. It is intended to be used when representing the mathematical division operator, e.g. in mathematical ...
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52
votes
Accepted
What are the closest Unicode symbols to represent these icons (double arrow, bulb, CLI interface, multiple tabs)?
On the website Shapecatcher.com you can make a drawing and it will try to determine what the closest Unicode character is that resembles your drawing (somewhat). I am in no way, shape or form ...
- 4,092
50
votes
How can I display the (U+F8FF, Apple logo) character on Windows?
The real question to you is, for what purpose you need it?
This character is Unicode F8FF, which is in the Private Use Areas and is not defined by the Unicode standard what it should be. So Apple in ...
- 5,440
50
votes
Is there a unicode character for the Windows key?
You have two options: you can use the character available in the Marlett icon font, which is the font that Windows itself uses to draw its icons, and is therefore the most authentic way to render the ...
- 11.4k
41
votes
Notepad++ inserting special Unicode characters in UTF-8
And now for something completely different, a cut and paste gallery:
☀☁☂☃☄☇☈☉☊☋☌☍☎☏☐☑☒☓【ツ】☚☛☜☝☞☟☠☡☢☣☤☥☦☧☨☩☪☫☬☭☮☯☸☹☺☻☼☽☾✁✂✃✄✆✇✈✉✌✍✎✏✐✑✒✓✔✕✖✗✘✙✚✛✜✝✞✟❍❏❐❑❒❖❘❙❚❡❢❣❤❥❦❧☿♀♁♂♃♄♅♆♇♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑♒♓♨
...
- 1,351
39
votes
What kind of special character is this: 𝓱𝒆𝓪𝓿𝒆𝓷𝓼 𝓰𝓪𝓽𝒆?
There are many Unicode-lookup websites; the one I use is Uniview by Richard Ishida of the W3C.
If you paste your text into the box on that page and click on the down arrow, it shows you each ...
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38
votes
Accepted
How to type the Euro Symbol € on US English keyboard in Windows 10 without a numpad or "AltGr" key?
Looking for a picture of an HP ProBook 430 which showed a keyboard large enough to read the keys well, I found this image:
It shows an Fn key between the Ctrl key (actually called Strg in this ...
- 15.1k
36
votes
What's that Unicode character in my clipboard?
Notepad++ has a pre-installed plug-in called Converter that has a option to Convert ASCII to HEX and Vice-versa. This tool is quite useful as to convert data files that are in HEX format which are to ...
- 15.4k
36
votes
Accepted
Why does Unicode have big or little endian but UTF-8 doesn't?
Note: Windows uses the term "Unicode" for UCS-2 due to historical reasons – originally that was the only way to encode Unicode codepoints into bytes, so the distinction didn't matter. But in ...
35
votes
Accepted
Windows 10 - Alt code results in wrong character
By default, the numeric keypad way of entering characters by code can only access the first 256 characters. (I believe these are defined by your system's code page for non-Unicode programs.) Codes ...
- 39.5k
32
votes
Accepted
What's that Unicode character in my clipboard?
I work a lot with Unicode characters, so I have written a small Windows application specifically for this:
Unicode Character Informer (Documentation)
In addition, my text editor, Rejbrand Text ...
- 796
30
votes
Copying unicode symbols from Firefox address bar as is
The setting was replaced with browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy in Firefox 53+. Set it to true.
For copying in Firefox on Android see https://android.stackexchange.com/q/224951/17612
- 312
30
votes
How do I debug an emoticon-based URL?
This is a two-step process, which involved a bit of trial and error in finding the right URL un-shorteners.
First of all, I tried a bunch of URL-unshorteners on the emoji-URL, until I found one that ...
- 693
30
votes
Accepted
What kind of special character is this: 𝓱𝒆𝓪𝓿𝒆𝓷𝓼 𝓰𝓪𝓽𝒆?
Those are characters from the “Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols” block. For example, the 𝒆:
Mathematical Bold Italic Small E
U+1D486
𝓽:
Mathematical Bold Script Small T
U+1D4FD
In ...
- 57.9k
29
votes
Why shouldn’t I use Unicode characters to simulate typographic styles (such as small caps or script)?
I'm having an XY problem with this.
Here, we see that Y and X appear smaller than the rest of the text. At certain zoom levels they appear to be the same size, but this appears to have exposed a ...
- 13.5k
28
votes
How can I type U+200B character?
When using recent versions of Chrome/Chromium, you can use its console to copy the character to clipboard:
copy("\u200B") // works for BMP characters only (U+0000 to U+FFFF)
copy("\u{200B}") ...
- 381
27
votes
What is this character: '*'?
With the help of @Rinzwind in the Ask Ubuntu chat room, I figured out that the problem isn't the character at all. Note the output of od:
$ printf '*' | od -c
0000000 * 342 200 213
0000004
The ...
- 51.9k
26
votes
How do these icons work: 🌍🌎🌏✅️?
In short: Firefox uses a font in which these symbols look the way they do.
These characters are a part of the Unicode Standard.
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding,...
- 2,223
24
votes
Why does Unicode have big or little endian but UTF-8 doesn't?
Exactly the same reason why an array of bytes (char[] in C or byte[] in many other languages) doesn't have any associated endianness but arrays of other types larger than byte do. It's because ...
- 25.2k
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