The Unicode standard includes many letters and digits in special fonts intended to be useful to mathematicians, residing mainly in the character block of code point range 1D400-1D7FF. This report organizes many of them, as well as related characters from elsewhere within Unicode.
Related is the present author's report that covers the rendering of the Arabic digits in various scripts.
Below are twelve links to pages with tables of the selected characters. Contents of the tables are largely in alphabetical or numerical order.
The characters are displayed in columns which are tinted various colors for ease of reading. On some pages, the plainest version of each character, which is not intended for precise mathematical typography, is in a gray column at the left for comparison. Yellow cells emphasize characters whose code point is out of numerical sequence; irregularities arise in part because Unicode is an evolving standard. Many categories of characters, once created in part, are subsequently expanded using whatever code numbers are still available at the later time.
All code points are given in hexadecimal numbers; mnemonics are included when they are known. Either way, a code can be copied-and-pasted into HTML source code. For example, either ℬ or ℬ yields ℬ. In non-HTML contexts, this character is often represented by the symbol U+212C. Such hexadecimal numbers, rather than decimal, are used in official Unicode documentation, and are the definitive way to identify a character. Glyphs do not suffice for this purpose, because two different fonts might provide substantially different glyphs for the same character; and because two different characters might have glyphs that look similar or the same.
Because Unicode has defined over 144,000 characters, few available fonts attempt to render them all; and in many fonts some characters are rendered poorly or inconsistently.
In the tables, superscripts and subscripts are shown inside a pair of reverse brackets for comparison.
Twelve links to detail pages | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Latin letters | table L-1 — Latin letters, sans-serif — sample:
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table L-2 — Latin letters, avec-serif — sample:
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table L-3 — Latin letters, monospaced — sample:
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table L-4 — Latin letters, enclosed — sample:
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table L-5 — Latin letters, miscellaneous — sample:
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Greek letters | table G-1 — Greek letters, main — sample:
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table G-2 — Greek letters, miscellaneous — sample:
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Numerals | table N-1 — Numerals, general — sample:
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table N-2 — Enclosed numerals — sample:
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table N-3 — Roman numerals — sample:
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table N-4 — Greek numerals — sample:
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table N-5 — Fractions — sample:
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Table H-1
Four Unicode Hebrew letters | ||||
plain text | ד ד | ג ג | ב ב | א א |
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math use | ℸ ℸ ℸ | ℷ ℷ ℷ | ℶ ℶ ℶ | ℵ ℵ ℵ |
Unicode allows adding diacritical markings to ordinary characters. Mathematicians often use these for specialized purposes. Examples.
As Unicode is a character set, and not a markup language, it does not provide comprehensive support for the typography of superscripts, subscripts, and fractions. To provide an example of what might be done in a markup language, however, here are some ways of effecting these in HTML:
HTML source code | result |
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base<sup>superscript</sup> | basesuperscript |
base<sub>subscript</sub> | basesubscript |
<sup>numer</sup>⁄<sub>denom</sub> | numer⁄denom |
HTML allows superscripts and subscripts (hence numerators and denominators) to be nested, although the results may be difficult to read correctly.
Definitions of pertinent Unicode blocks | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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There are hundreds of non-pertinent blocks. |
Although the above documents do a throrough job of defining the standard, they are not always convenient for people seeking particular characters. Many web sites, including the present one, have sprung up to make such character searches easier.
Additionally, Unicode Technical Report #25 provides guidance and rationales for use of mathematical characters.
Colophon.
In the original work of year 2022, the pages containing the tables in the L-, G-, and N- series were generated by a custom-written C++ program, which also generated the samples that appear on this page. This was done in a Mac Xcode environment. Other parts of this page were created directly with a text editor. Then they were all combined with a Unix script. This indirect approach was made necessary in order to manage the many characters to be treated, and the need to devise a consistent format for organizing them, which in turn required seemingly endless tinkering.
In the revisions of year 2024, design of the project had stabilized, simplifying further development. At this point the C++ program was discarded, with further changes being made directly in the HTML files using the Xcode text editor, which is HTML-aware.