Are there Unicode characters that represent Copy and Paste? Perhaps in Unicode 6?
(there are scissor symbols that can be used fittingly to represent Cut (e.g. ✂ U+2702) but i could never find one to represent Copy or Paste.)
How about this: ⎘ = ⎘ which looks kind of like a copy from clipboard.
For Paste, the CLIPBOARD symbol (U+1F4CB) would be likely;
📋
My solution is to use two 📄 emojis and layer them over each other like so:
<span style="font-size: .875em; margin-right: .125em; position: relative; top: -.25em; left: -.125em">
📄<span style="position: absolute; top: .25em; left: .25em">📄</span>
</span>
(Of course I'm a web developer, so I have access to HTML. You might need to accomplish this another way. But I'm guessing a good chunk of people looking for an answer to this UI problem are using unicode in a website.)
The neat thing about this solution is if the thing you're copying is better represented by an icon other than 📄, you might be able to switch out the emoji for something else.
The scissor ✂️ and clipboard 📋 emojis are then suitable cut/paste companions.
I use scissors character for “cut out” on site — https://unicode-table.com/
To copy I use two squares but you could also use — Two Consecutive Equals Signs or Mahjong Tile Two of Bamboos.
To paste I use - Clipboard characters.
These characters correspond to characters in word.
Was looking as well, found these alternatives: ☍ ⊕ ⎘ ⩲ ⨧ ⑃ ended up using ⎘ like suggested above
There is an insertion symbol: x2380 ⎀
Unicode encodes characters used in texts, not ideas or concepts. So unless there is a character commonly used in texts to symbolize cut and paste, you shouldn’t expect to find such a symbol in Unicode.
U+2702 BLACK SCISSORS is in Unicode since it appears in older character codes, and it has been used in printed documents to indicate a cutting line, as a “cut here” indicator, rather than as a symbol of copying.
An (HTML-only) solution using emojis from the modern set*
Concept
HEX character code
Literal Emoji
Copy = Camera
📷
📷
Cut = Scissors
✂️
✂️
Paste = Clipboard
📋
📋
Emojis vary in appearance depending on device and font in use
Related
Where can I get the complete list of all unicode characters that doesn't behave as simple characters. Examples: character 0x0363 (won't be printed without another one before), character 0x0084 (does weird things when printed). I need just a raw list of such unusual characters to replace them with something harmless to avoid unwanted output effects. Regular characters (those who not in this list) should use exactly one character place when printed (= cursor moved +1 to the right), should not depend on previous or next characters, and should not affect printing style in any way.
Edit because of multiple comments:
I have some unicode string, usually consists of "usual" characters like 0x20-0x7E or cyrillic letters. Also, there are a lot of other unicode characters that are usual and may be safely assumed as having strlen() = 1. The string is printed on the terminal and I should know the resulting position of the cursor. I don't want to use some complex and non-stable libraries to do that, i want to have simplest possible logic to do that. Every problematic character may be replaced with U+0xFFFD or something like "<U+0363>" (ASCII string with its index instead of character itself). I want to have a list of "possibly-problematic" characters to replace. It is acceptable to have some non-problematic characters in this list too, but not much.
There is no simple algorithm for this. You'll likely need a complex, but extremely stable library: libicu, or something based on it. Basically every other library that does this kind of work is based on libicu, which is maintained by the Unicode organization.
If you don't want to use the official library (or something based on their library), you'll need to parse the Unicode Character Database yourself. In particular, you need to look at Character Properties, and parse the files in the UCD.
I believe you're asking for Bidi_Class (i.e. "direction") to be Left_To_Right, Canonical_Combining_Class to be Not_Reordered, and Joining_Type to be Non_Joining.
You probably also want to check the General_Category and avoid M* (Marks) and C* (Other).
This should work for some Emoji, but this whole approach will break a lot of emoji that look simple and are not. Most famously: ❤️, which is two "characters," not one. You may want to filter out Emoji. As a simple starting point, you may want to restrict yourself to the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which are code points 0000-FFFF. Anything above this range is, almost by definition, rare or unusual. The BMP does include some emoji, but most emoji (and all new emoji) are outside the range.
Remember that the glyphs for single characters can still have radically different widths, even in nominally fixed-width fonts. For example, 𒈙 (U+12219 CUNEIFORM SIGN LUGAL OPPOSING LUGAL) is a completely "normal" character in the way you're describing. It is left-to-right. It doesn't depend on or influence characters around it (it's non-combining and non-joining). Its "length in characters" is 1. Its glyph is also extremely wide in most fonts and breaks a lot of layout. I don't know anything in the Unicode database that would warn you of this, since "glyph width" is entirely a function of fonts, not characters, and Unicode explicitly does not consider fonts. (That said, most of the most problematic characters are outside the BMP. Probably the most common exception is DŽ, but many fixed-width fonts have a narrow glyph for it: DŽ.)
Let's write some cuneiform in a fixed-width font.
Normally, every character should line up with a character above.
Here: 𒈙. See how these characters don't align correctly?
Not only is it a very wide glyph, but its width is not even a multiple.
At least not in my font (Mac Safari 15.0).
But DŽ is ok.
Also remember that there are multiple ways to encode the same "character." For example, é can be a "simple" character (U+00E9), or it can be two characters (U+0065, U+0301). So in some cases é may print in your scheme, and in others it won't. I suspect this is fine for your problem, but if it isn't, you're going to need to apply a normalization form (likely NFC).
The way the unicode symbol is displayed depends on whether I use the White Heavy Check Mark or the Negative Squared Cross Mark before it or not. If I do, the Warning Sign is coloured. If I put a space between the symbols, I get the mono-coloured text-like version.
Why does this behaviour exist and can I force the coloured symbol somehow?
I tried a couple of different REPLs, the behaviour was the same.
; No colour
(str (char 0x274e) " " (char 0x26A0))
; Coloured
(str (char 0x274e) "" (char 0x26A0))
Clojure unicode display.
I expect the symbol being displayed the same way regardless of which symbol comes before it.
Why does this behaviour exist
A vendor thought it would be a neat idea to render emoji glyhps in colour. The idea caught on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Emoji_versus_text_presentation
can I force the coloured symbol somehow
U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 and U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16
http://mts.io/2015/04/21/unicode-symbol-render-text-emoji/
Unicode is about characters (code points), not glyphs (see it as "image" of a character).
Fonts are free to (and should) merge nearby characters into a single glyphs. In printed Latin scripts this is not very common (but we could have it e.g. ff,fi, ffi), without considering the combining codepoints which, per definition, should combine with other characters, to get just one glyph,
Many other scripts require it. Starting to cursive Latin scripts, but most cursive scripts requires changes. E.g. Arabic has different glyphs of initial, final, middle or separated character (+ special combination, common to cursive scripts). Indian scripts have similar behaviours.
So the base of Unicode has already this behaviour, and modern good fonts should be able to do it.
It was not so late, that emojii uses such functionality, e.g. country letters/flags to other common cases.
Often the Unicode documentation tell you of such possibilities, and the special code points which could change behaviour, but then it is task of the font to fullfil the expected behaviour (and to find good glyphs).
So: character (as unicode code point) is not one to one to a design (glyphs).
Does unicode have characters in it similar to stuff like the things formed by the <kbd> tag in HTML? I want to use it as part of a game to indicate that the user can press a key to perform a certain action, for example:
Press R to reset, or S to open the settings menu.
Are there characters for that? I don't need anything fancy like ⇧ Shift or Tab ⇆, single-letter keys are plenty. I am looking for something that would work somewhat like the Enclosed Alphanumerics subrange.
If there are characters for that, where could I find a page describing them? All the google searches I tried turned only turned up "unicode character keyboard shortcuts" stuff.
If there are not characters for that, how can I display something like that as part of (or at least in line with) a text string in Processing 2.0.1?
(The rendering referred to is not the default rendering of kbd, which simply shows the content in the system’s default monospace font. But e.g. in StackOverflow pages, a style sheet is used to format kbd so that it looks like a keycap.)
Somewhat surprisingly, there is a Unicode way to create something that looks like a character in a keycap: enter the character, then immediately COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP U+20E3.
Font support to this character is very limited but contains a few free fonts. Unfortunately, none of them is a sans-serif font, and the character to be shown inside should normally appear in such a font – after all, real keycaps contains very simple shapes for characters, without serifs. And generally, a character and an enclosing mark should be taken from the same font; otherwise they might be incompatible. However, it seems that taking the normal character from the sans-serif font (FreeSans) in GNU Freefont and the combining mark from the serif font (FreeSerif) of the same source creates a reasonable presentation:
I’m afraid it won’t work here in text, but I’ll try: A⃣ .
Whether this works depends on the use of suitable fonts, as mentioned, but also on the rendering software. Programs have been rather bad at displaying combining marks, but there has been some improvement. I tested this in Word 2007, where it works OK, and also on web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) with good results using code like this:
<style>
.cap { font-family: FreeSerif; }
.cap span { font-family: FreeSans; }
</style>
<span class="cap"><span>A</span>⃣</span>
It isn’t perfect, when using the fonts mentioned. The character in the cap is not quite centered. Moreover, if I try to use the technique e.g. for the character Å (which is present on normal Nordic keyboards), the ring above A extends out of the cap. You could tweak this by setting the font size of the letter in the cap to, say, 85% of the font size of the combining mark, but then the horizontal position of the letter is even more off.
To summarize, it is possible to do such things at the character level, but if you can use other methods, like using a border or a background image for a character, you can probably achieve better rendering.
Following this lead, I tried this in a Github README.md:
<span style="vertical-align: baseline; position: relative;top: -0.5em;>text in superscript</span>
Does not work, the text appears as normal. Help?
Use the <sup></sup>tag (<sub></sub> is the equivalent for subscripts). See this gist for an example.
You have a few options for this. The answer depends on exactly what you're trying to do, how readable you want the content to be when viewed as Markdown and where your content will be rendered:
HTML Tags
As others have said, <sup> and <sub> tags work well for arbitrary text. Embedding HTML in a Markdown document like this is well supported so this approach should work with most tools that render Markdown.
Personally, I find HTML impairs the readable of Markdown somewhat, when working with it "bare" (eg. in a text editor) but small tags like this aren't too bad.
LaTeX (New!)
As of May 2022, GitHub supports embedding LaTeX expressions in Markdown docs directly. This gives us new way to render arbitrary text as superscript or subscript in GitHub flavoured Markdown, and it works quite well.
LaTeX expressions are delineated by $$ for blocks or $ for inline expressions. In LaTeX you indicate superscript with the ^ and subscript with _. Curly braces ({ and }) can be used to group characters. You also need to escape spaces with a backslash. The GitHub implementation uses MathJax so see their docs for what else is possible.
You can use super or subscript for mathematical expressions that require it, eg:
$$e^{-\frac{t}{RC}}$$
Which renders as..
Or render arbitrary text as super or subscript inline, eg:
And so it was indeed: she was now only $_{ten\ inches\ high}$, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden.
Which renders as..
I've put a few other examples here in a Gist.
Unicode
If the superscript (or subscript) you need is of a mathematical nature, Unicode may well have you covered.
I've compiled a list of all the Unicode super and subscript characters I could identify in this gist. Some of the more common/useful ones are:
⁰ SUPERSCRIPT ZERO (U+2070)
¹ SUPERSCRIPT ONE (U+00B9)
² SUPERSCRIPT TWO (U+00B2)
³ SUPERSCRIPT THREE (U+00B3)
ⁿ SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER N (U+207F)
People also often reach for <sup> and <sub> tags in an attempt to render specific symbols like these:
™ TRADE MARK SIGN (U+2122)
® REGISTERED SIGN (U+00AE)
℠ SERVICE MARK (U+2120)
Assuming your editor supports Unicode, you can copy and paste the characters above directly into your document or find them in your systems emoji and symbols picker.
On MacOS, simultaneously press the Command ⌘ + Control + Space keys to open the emoji picker. You can browse or search, or click the small icon in the top right to open the more advanced Character Viewer.
On Windows, you can a emoji and symbol picker by pressing ⊞ Windows + ..
Alternatively, if you're putting these characters in an HTML document, you could use the hex values above in an HTML character escape. Eg, ² instead of ². This works with GitHub (and should work anywhere else your Markdown is rendered to HTML) but is less readable when presented as raw text.
Images
If your requirements are especially unusual, you can always just inline an image. The GitHub supported syntax is:
You can use a full path (eg. starting with https:// or http://) but it's often easier to use a relative path, which will load the image from the repo, relative to the Markdown document.
If you happen to know LaTeX (or want to learn it) you could do just about any text manipulation imaginable and render it to an image. Sites like Quicklatex make this quite easy. Of course, if you know your document will be rendered on GitHub, you can use the new (2022) embedded LaTeX syntax discussed earlier)
Comments about previous answers
The universal solution is using the HTML tag <sup>, as suggested in the main answer.
However, the idea behind Markdown is precisely to avoid the use of such tags:
The document should look nice as plain text, not only when rendered.
Another answer proposes using Unicode characters, which makes the document look nice as a plain text document but could reduce compatibility.
Finally, I would like to remember the simplest solution for some documents: the character ^.
Some Markdown implementation (e.g. MacDown in macOS) interprets the caret as an instruction for superscript.
Ex.
Sin^2 + Cos^2 = 1
Clearly, Stack Overflow does not interpret the caret as a superscript instruction. However, the text is comprehensible, and this is what really matters when using Markdown.
If you only need superscript numbers, you can use pure Unicode. It provides all numbers plus several additional characters as superscripts:
x⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁺⁻⁼⁽⁾ⁿⁱ
However, it might be that the chosen font does not support them, so be sure to check the rendered output.
In fact, there are even quite a few superscript letters, however, their intended use might not be for superscript, and font support might be even worse. Use your own judgement.
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:
Combining Diacritical Marks (PDF)
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:
Copying the text from the PDF and inspecting it, but the copy is disabled in the PDF.
Emailing it to myself in Gmail and then viewing the attachment as HTML, but there is gets converted to U+0024 ("DOLLAR SIGN"). Which means that either the conversion failed or they are just playing some font rendering games in the PDF.
[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.
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.
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">
◌̀
◌́
◌̂
◌̃
<br/>
À
Á
Â
Ã
<br/>
̀
́
̂
̃
</font>
</body>
</html>