Dave Mateer
Dave Mateer

Reputation: 17946

What's the unicode glyph used to indicate combining characters?

My application needs to display "orphaned" combining characters. I would like to use the same format as the "official" unicode charts, using the dotted circle placeholder. See, for example:

A quick scan through the charts and I came up with U+25CC "DOTTED CIRCLE". That looks good, but the note on this character reads:

note that the reference glyph for this character is intentionally larger than the dotted circle glyph used to indicate combining characters in this standard; see, for example, 0300

Which says (I think) that U+25CC is not the correct character. (Or, if it is, perhaps just a poorly worded note.)

So: if the dotted circle used on the "Combining Diacritical Marks" is not U+25CC, what is the correct code for that little booger?

I have tried:

[Clarification] I realize that the U+25CC looks OK (assuming one's font supports it), but it sounds like the spec says that this is the wrong character. Many unicode characters have similar glyphs but are different characters, semantically speaking. "Latin Capital Letter A" (U+0041) and "Greek Capital Letter Alpha" (U+0391) will look identical for most fonts, but they have different semantic meanings and are not interchangable.

Upvotes: 14

Views: 6814

Answers (2)

Alan Moore
Alan Moore

Reputation: 75222

I don't think there is an official placeholder character. The way I read that note, they chose U+25CC arbitrarily, purely for display purposes. Then, in the chart where the "real" dotted circle is listed, they made it a little larger to emphasize that it's not being used as a placeholder there. (Or maybe they shrunk it in the other charts; as you said, the note's poorly worded.)

Whatever the case, I don't see any reason not to use U+25CC as your placeholder.

Upvotes: 8

devio
devio

Reputation: 37205

Just tried this: create a blank .html file, copy the text, and load in Firefox. Displays as expected (although I really didn't expect space+combining character to display correctly):

<html>
<body>
<font size="24pt">
&#x25CC;&#x0300;
&#x25CC;&#x0301;
&#x25CC;&#x0302;
&#x25CC;&#x0303;
<br/>
&#x0041;&#x0300;
&#x0041;&#x0301;
&#x0041;&#x0302;
&#x0041;&#x0303;
<br/>
&#x0020;&#x0300;
&#x0020;&#x0301;
&#x0020;&#x0302;
&#x0020;&#x0303;
</font>
</body>
</html>

Upvotes: 3

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