Unicode Compatibility Characters - Compatibility Character Types and Keywords

Compatibility Character Types and Keywords

The compatibility decomposition property for the 5,402 Unicode compatibility characters includes a keyword that divides the compatibility characters into 17 logical groups. Those characters with a compatibility decomposition but without a keyword are termed canonical decomposable characters and those characters are not compatibility characters. Keywords for compatibility decomposable characters include: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . These keywords provide some indication of the relation between the compatibility character and its compatibility decomposition character sequence. Compatibility characters fall in three basic categories:

  1. Characters corresponding to multiple alternate glyph forms and precomposed diacritics to support software and font implementations that do not include complete Unicode text layout capabilities.
  2. Characters included from other character sets or otherwise added to the UCS that constitute rich text rather than the plain text goals of Unicode.
  3. Some other characters that are semantically distinct, but visually similar.

Because these semantically distinct characters may be displayed with glyphs similar to the glyphs of other characters, text processing software should try to address possible confusion for the sake of end users. When comparing and collating (sorting) text strings, different forms and rich text variants of characters should not alter the text processing results. For example, software users may be confused when performing a find on a page for a capital Latin letter ‘I’ and their software application fails to find the visually similar Roman numeral ‘Ⅰ’.

Read more about this topic:  Unicode Compatibility Characters

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