Unicode

Unicode is a crazy thing...

♙♙♙

The tough guy's ASCII. I loved the idea since the start, although it has always been clear to me that it would be a broken system, full of frustrations.

It actually works better than you would think. And then you can have fun putting some 👩 or ⛑ or ♛ ♘ ⛔ ☭ ☣ ☠ 🍹 ⚕ � etc, etc. in what one likes the most of a computer: plain text.

To enter a Unicode character of which you knows the code, in Linux, in many applications go for ctrl+shift+U and the code itself.

E.g., ctrl+shift+U+0239 gives you... ȹ.

In Emacs, C-x 8 RET.

In html, &#xcode; produces the character, .e.g., = for instance, produces = which could be useful as the actual = could break a template (such as the cite one).

In Mediawiki, {{unicode|&#code;}} could be used.

Useful entries to remember:

  • Non-breakable space ( ) " " 00A0
  • Greek goes from 3B1 (α) to 3C9 (ω), the most popular being:
    • 3B2 β (easy)
    • 3B3 γ (easy)
    • 3B4 δ (still easy)
    • 3B5 ε (still easy)
    • 3B7 θ
    • 3BC μ
    • 3C0 π
    • 3C3 σ
    • 3F0 ϰ
    • 3C8 ψ
  • The upcase equivalents 393 Γ, 394 Δ, 398 Θ, 39B Λ, 3A3 Σ, 3A6 Φ, 3A8 Ψ, 3A9 Ω.
  • M-dash: 2014 —
  • Left arrow: 2192 →
    • There are lot more: 🡢 ⟶ 🡒 🠂 🡒 🡺 (see Xah Lee for a list).
  • You can also generate quite a lot of superscript and subscript letters, e.g., ⁽¹⁾, ², ³, ⁴, ⁵, ⁶, ⁷, ⁸, ⁹, ⁰ & ₍₁₎, ₂, ₃, ₄, ₅, ₆, ₇, ₈, ₉, ₀.

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