E.3. Characters and Glyphs

The Unicode Standard consists of characters, written components (i.e., alphabetic letters, numerals, punctuation marks, accent marks, etc.) that can be represented by numeric values. Examples of characters include: U+0041 Latin capital letter A. In the first character representation, U+yyyy is a code value, in which U+ refers to Unicode code values, as opposed to other hexadecimal values. The yyyy represents a four-digit hexadecimal number of an encoded character. Code values are bit combinations that represent encoded characters. Characters are represented with glyphs, various shapes, fonts and sizes for displaying characters. There are no code values for glyphs in the Unicode Standard. Examples of glyphs are shown in Fig. E.2.

Figure E.2. Various glyphs of the character A.

The Unicode Standard encompasses the alphabets, ideographs, syllabaries, punctuation marks, diacritics, mathematical operators, etc., that comprose the written languages and scripts of the world. A diacritic is a special mark added to a character to distinguish it from another letter or to indicate an accent (e.g., in Spanish, the tilde "~" above the character "n"). Currently, Unicode provides code values for 94,140 character representations, with more than 880,000 code values reserved for future expansion.