Sunday, September 18th, 2005
I recently decided to brush up on Unicode because I’m preparing to redesign this website and I’d like it to fully use Unicode as it’s text-delivery format.
What is Unicode? It is basically a mapping of a single number that represents each character in every writing system. It even includes some dead languages from the past.
Here are some great places to learn more.
- Unicode website
- Wikipedia entry
- Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- Tim Bray’s Characters vs. Bytes
I was struggling with how to enter Unicode characters on Mac OS X, when I finally found some useful tools that can be enabled by the “Input Menu” tab of the International System Preferences. If you enable “Character Palette” and “Unicode Hex Input”, you’ll get a little flag in your menu bar that lets you choose among two useful input methods:
Character Palette - graphically pick your glyphs (see screenshot)
Unicode Hex Input - type in the hex Unicode code point while holding down the option key
Here’s some examples, for your viewing pleasure.
〆 = ideographic closing mark (U+3006)
☃ = snowman (U+2603)
♥ = heart (U+2665)
⌘ = place of interest sign (U+2318)
☮ = peace sign (U+262E)
∃ = there exists (U+2203)
∢ = spherical angle (U+2222)
’ = apostrophe (decimal 8217)
Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, あ, 叶, 葉, and 냻
