Character Variations ©MJH 2022-2023
(File modified: July 30, 2024 11:25 am)
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Michael J. Hannah, Los Ranchos, NM.
Partial Variation Selector Tables for some Unicode blocks
• x0000-x00FF Basic Latin and -1 Supplement
• x02B0-x02FF Spacing Modifier Letters
• x1D00-x1D7F Phonetic Extensions
x1D80-x1DBF Phonetic Extensions Supplement
• x2000-x206F General Punctuation
x2070-x209F Superscripts and Subscripts
x20A0-x20CF Currency Symbols
x20D0-x20FF Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols
x2100-x214F Letterlike Sym
x2150-x218F Number Forms
x2190-x21FF Arrows
• x2200-x23FF Mathematical and Technical
• x2460-x25FF Enclosed Alphanumerics, Box, Block, and Geometric
• x2600-x27BF Miscellaneous Symbols, Dingbats, Math-A, Arrows-A
• x2900-x297F Arrows-B;
x2B00-x2BFF Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows;
x2C60-x2C7F Latin extended-C
x2D30-x2D7F Tifinagh;
x3000-x303F CJK;
• x1F0A0-x1F0FF Playing Cards
• x1F100-x1F1FF Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement
• x1F300-x1F5FF Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
• x1F600-x1F6FF Emoticons, Dingbats, Transport & Map Symbols
x1F780-x1F7FF Geometric Shapes Extended
x1F800-x1F8FF Supplemental Arrows-C
x1F900-x1F9FF Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs
x1FA70-x1FAFF Symbols and Pictographs Ext-A
x1FB00-x1FBFF Symbols for Legacy Computing
I have developed these tables to be able to select desired special characters available in the font families I have selected to use for my web pages. My Style Sheet web page details how I produce all my web pages by converting them from FrameMaker® desktop publishing files, and refer to it for details below. As described in the Custom Fonts section of that page I have installed a fixed set of font families on my web domain. Unless a user’s browser prevents the use of fonts from the page, all my pages will use them and have a consistent look. Otherwise the character will be displayed using whichever of their browser’s or operating system’s font families defines that character.
The tables below display the characters using two different paragraph styles:
• TopCtr which is defined to use the default set of Serif fonts I use for narrative text, but the paragraph can contain a character format override which uses a set of monospaced Sans-Serif fonts, and
• SymbolCtr which is defined to use a set of Symbols and Emoji fonts intended for displaying both text and symbol variations of symbol/emoji characters.
The TopCtr paragraph style uses New Century Schoolbook1 with a fallback of Symbola2. Between the two these also define most text variations of the emoji/symbol characters. For special purposes I have defined a monospaced Sans-Serif character format override to apply to characters within the paragraph. This character format imposes the use of Noto Sans Mono3 with a fallback of FreeMono4 to also provide special graphic characters. Like most monospaced fonts these override fonts only include some of the basic monospaced graphic characters found in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (UBMP).
The SymbolCtr paragraph style uses Noto Emoji5 with fallbacks in turn of the above Symbola then Noto Color Emoji6. Most of the Unicode emoji/symbol characters are defined among these three fonts, and Symbola also contains Serif text fonts if needed. Due to this order of the fallbacks, if the emoji/symbol character is defined in either Noto Emoji or Symbola it will display as a text variation, since that is how those fonts generally define special characters. If not defined in either font it will be displayed in Noto Color Emoji whose variations are generally colored. I can specifically bypass the first two fonts and force an emoji variation on an individual character by appending the Unicode emoji variation selector (️).
NOTE: If none of the following example emoji characters appear in color the browser being used does not recognize the Unicode emoji variation selector:
These table formats are based on the Unicode Organization’s public (incomplete) example list of emoji variation sequences for the Unicode 15.0 versions. My following tables are NOT complete. They are limited to those sequences and characters I have investigated and considered for my own use in my personal web pages. For more complete tables of Unicode characters than these see several on-line sites such as:
I refer to this site the most: first to identify specific characters within an appropriate Unicode block which I may wish to use by viewing its “List with images”, and second to identify fonts which support a specific block I intend to use.
• Unicode blocks: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm
• Unicode 15.0 Character Code Charts by type: https://www.unicode.org/charts/
• Emoji List, v15.0, examples by vendor: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
• Unicode 15.0 hex blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block
• Emoji chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
• Unicode blocks: https://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/
One of the most common uses for a single Unicode character is for a pointer. There are a large number of choices for the four most common purposes: Left, Right, Up, and Down. (I discovered a few additional possibilities in non-standard code blocks7, but I have not included them here.) The following are those I have considered which occur in the Serif/Symbola pair of fonts I primarily use. For the variations of each of these pointer characters see their entries in the tables below. See also further pointer possibilities in the on-line FileFormat.Info tables of the Arrows Block x2190-21FF, Supplemental Arrows-A Block x27F0-x27FF, Supplemental Arrows-B Block x2900-x297F, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows Block x2B00-x2BFF, Supplemental Arrows-C Block x1F800-x1F8FF. In the lists below where there is an emoji variation I only display two variations: default (which for all of these is my primary Serif/Symbola fonts) and emoji.
Left pointers:
003C <, 02C2 ˂, 2329 〈, 2343 ⍃, 23F4 ⏴, 25C0 ◀ ◀️, 25C1 ◁, 25C2 ◂, 25C3 ◃, 25C4 ◄, 25C5 ◅, 2B05 ⬅ ⬅️, 2BC7 ⯇, 1F780 🞀
Right pointers:
003E >, 02C3 ˃, 232A 〉, 2344 ⍄, 23F5 ⏵, 25B6 ▶ ▶️, 25B7 ▷, 25B8 ▸, 25B9 ▹, 25BA ►, 25BB ▻, 27A1 ➡ ➡️, 2BC8 ⯈, 1F782 🞂
Up pointers:
005E ^, 02C4 ˄, 2227 ∧, 22C0 ⋀, 2303 ⌃, 2353 ⍓, 23F6 ⏶, 25B2 ▲, 25B3 △, 25B4 ▴, 25B5 ▵, 2B06 ⬆ ⬆️, 2BC5 ⯅, 1F53C 🔼 🔼️, 1F781 🞁
Down pointers:
02C5 ˅, 2228 ∨, 22C1 ⋁, 2304 ⌄, 234C ⍌, 23F7 ⏷, 25BC ▼, 25BD ▽, 25BE ▾, 25BF ▿, 2B07 ⬇ ⬇️, 2BC6 ⯆, 1F53D 🔽 🔽️, 1F783 🞃
The first table column identifies the Unicode character’s hex value. The next four columns display that character using its HTML hex entity (&#xnnnn;). The first two of these use the TopCtr paragraph format: first with its default set of fonts, the second with the monospaced Sans-Serif character override set of fonts. The last two columns use the SymbolCtr paragraph format with its Symbols and Emoji fonts: the first of these two will display a text variation if one exists. The final example column appends the Unicode emoji (️) variation selector to the character’s code with no intervening space to force an emoji display if defined.
Note that if the Serif and Text column variations look identical, they are probably both being displayed from the Symbola font. If the Text and Emoji versions look identical they are probably both being displayed from one of the two Text fonts. However in many cases the Text and Emoji symbol versions will be different.
The code INT422 in a table below indicates that character is used in a table in my web page describing Programming an INT422 electronic remote control.
The Emoji Display of some characters in the Emoji column are specially coded as an aid to me:
• [ED-T]
I use this code when a character is actually displayed in color but it displays as a black/grey symbol which is easily assumed to be a Text variation.
• [ED-C]
I use this code when a character which I might not assume would be colored (even in the Emoji column) is actually displayed in a color. In some cases the standardized description names a color for a character. [For examples see the “black” double triangle emojis x23E9-x23EE which display in this font as white on orange.] If this chosen font displays with a different color than its “normal” Unicode description that font’s color is specified as part of this code.
Finally, if the character is Not Defined in the fonts being used in that column the example of the character is replaced with [ND]. Note that like most monospaced fonts my chosen monospaced override fonts do not define any characters in the emoji/symbol character blocks, so that column is not included in those tables.
Tables of Character Variations
x0000-x00FF, Basic Latin and -1 Supplement
x02B0-x02FF, Spacing Modifier Letters
x1D00-x1D7F, Phonetic Extensions
x1D80-x1DBF, Phonetic Extensions Supplement
x2000-x21FF Punctuation, Superscripts&Subscripts
Letterlike Sysbols, Fractions, Basic Arrows
x2200-x23FF Mathematical and Technical
x2460-x25FF Enclosed Alphanumerics, Box, Block, and Geometric
x2600-x27FF Miscellaneous Symbols, Dingbats, Math-A, Arrows-A
x2900-x297F Arrows-B; x2B00-x2BFF Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows; x2C60-x2C7F Latin extended-C; x2D30-x2D7F Tifinagh; x3000-x303F CJK
All except Black Joker are undefined in Symbol and revert to Symbola
x1F100-x1F1FF Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement
x1F300-x1F5FF Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
x1F600-x1F6FF Emoticons, Dingbats, Transport & Map Symbols;
x1F780-x1F7FF Geometric Shapes Extended
x1F900-x1F9FF Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs
x1FA70-x1FAFF Symbols and Pictographs Ext-A
x1F800-x1F8FF Supplemental Arrows-C
x1FB00-x1FBFF Symbols for Legacy Computings
[All defined emoji symbols ND-C except as noted]
[If emoji not defined, uses Symbola]
Endnotes
1. The New Century Schoolbook, version C059, set of otf and ttf files was downloaded in 2023 as part of the URW++ Core 35 fonts, Version 2.0 using the URL https://www.freefonts.io/wp-content/
2. The Symbola, version 13, single otf file was downloaded in 2023 using the URL https://github.com/ChiefMikeK/ttf-symbola/blob/master/Symbola-13.otf.
3. The Noto Sans Mono, version v21, set of font-face files was downloaded in 2023 using the URL https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Sans+Mono:wght@100..900 which in turn contained the URLs of the woff2 files to download.
4. The FreeMono, version 20120503, is available from the GNU FreeFont project with a home page at https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/. Its sets of file types of woff, otf and ttf were downloaded in 2023 using the URL http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/. This font family’s files were contained within the respective .zip or .tar.gz packages for each file type,
5. The Noto Emoji, version 34, set of font-face files was downloaded in 2023 using the URL https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Emoji:wght@300..700 which in turn contained the URLs of the woff2 files to download.
6. The Noto Color Emoji, version 24, set of font-face files was downloaded in 2023 using the URL https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Color+Emoji which in turn contained the URLs of the woff2 files to download.
7. There are three characters (x2D37, x2D38, and x2D66) in the Tifinagh language block of x2D30-x2D7F which I considered using for up, down, and left pointers respectively. However since none of my fixed font families define these characters I do not use them.
Disclaimer
I do not warrant in any way that this document is accurate or useful, and any use of it is at the user’s own risk.
As described in a separate document, this document was composed with Adobe® FrameMaker 2019®, converted using its hyperlink and "Save as HTML" features, post-processed with my custom Perl© script, linked to my Responsive CSS file which references my fixed set of fonts, and the HTML and CSS are W3C validated.
©MJH Consulting, 2022-2023. All rights reserved.
(Content modified: May, 2023)