Meet Unicode, the reason we can insert characters from different languages, symbols like Ô and even emojis onto our documents instantly. Think of Unicode as an extensive list that gives every character in existence a distinct number. The system makes sure that regardless of the brand or type of device you are using, the recipient sees exactly what you have sent whether it’s an emoji like 🍏, or a Chinese character like 苹果 (the name of this website!).
Allowing us to communicate with all these signs, symbols and characters on our devices inspires multilingual communication while retaining the intricacies of languages all around the world. Even something as simple as someone’s name in Irish, such as Áine, would not be possible to display on a device without Unicode. It has a unique code for Á, but also À, Â, Ä, Æ and so on. I can see how this system is especially important when it comes to jobs like translating and interpreting, as leaving out a character or accent would be detrimental to the sentence’s meaning.
The next time you are writing an essay or taking notes on Microsoft Word, click on the “Insert” tab from the headings at the top menu.
Next, find the “Symbol” option, click on that, and then the “Advanced Symbols” option.
Here you will find all the symbols and letters with accents that you need. If you click on the “TM” symbol, you will see below that it says, “Insert Arial Character 153 (Unicode character 2122)”.
Inserting this character will bring up “TM” on your document.
You now know how to see Unicode at work with all its different codes for different symbols!
I hope you enjoyed today’s post on Unicode, keep an eye out on this page for a longer blog post coming up just in time for Christmas!
Korpela, Jukka K. Unicode explained. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”, 2006.