Section 8.4. Other Latin Letters

8.4. Other Latin Letters

The Latin-1 Supplement covers most languages spoken in Western and Northern Europe. There are many other languages that use a script based on Latin letters. The ISO 8859 set of standards contains various sets of 8-bit codes with different upper halves that cover some of those languages. In Unicode, however, the structure is different. It has:

• Latin Extended-A block (U+0100..U+017F), which contains a large set of Latin letters with diacritic marks as well as some additional letters. They appear in a more or less alphabetic order and include letters used in East European languages written in Latin letters (Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, etc.): ... ſ

• Latin Extended Additional block (U+1E00..U+1EFF), which is yet another supplement: Ḁ ḁ Ḃ ḃ ... Ỹ ỹ.

When looking for a Latin letter with a diacritic, or a supposedly "Latin letter" in the broad sense, you should normally look for the Latin 1 Supplement first (especially if the text is in a Western European language), then the Latin Extended-A block. Sometimes you need to check the other two blocks as well. This is somewhat inconvenient of course and demonstrates how Unicode has been built up in a piecewise manner, rather than systematically designed from scratch.