Typography and Unicode – Standard letters and numbers

European character repertoire: These pages are about the most common characters and symbols needed for good typography for all major European languages. The aim is to provide a relatively small subset of Unicode that is sufficient for all general-purpose texts.

A B C a b c 1 2 3
Basic alphabet
All basic letters of the Latin alphabet and the standard numerals

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Basic special characters
A fundamental set of characters such as punctuation marks, mathematical, currency and typographic symbols

¿ Á Æ ħ ñ ö ş ß Þ
Extensions (alphabetic)

Extensions (by language)
All special letters and characters added for use by specific languages to the basic Latin alphabet and character set

´ ` ^ ˇ ˙ ¨ ˝ ˚ ˜
Diacritics
Separate list of all common diacritical marks or accents

🇩🇪 🇪🇸 🇫🇮 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇮🇹 🇵🇱 🇷🇴 🇸🇪
European languages
All major European languages, including the official languages of the European Union

“…” ‘…’ „…“ »…«
Quotation marks
Correct formats for quotation marks and the decimal separator for all major European languages

∅ ® ↑ ■ 🖃 🚶 ✓ ☺ ⏭
Symbols
Some additional symbols in common usage

♀ ♂ ⚤ * ~ ⚭ † ⚔ ⚰
Genealogy
All common genealogical symbols and all Unicode symbols related to gender, sex and sexual orientation

ſ Ꝛ ‡ ❧ ⁂ ⁊ ℞ ₰ ℥
History
Some characters relevant for historic texts

" ‛ Ω ℃ № ﬀ Ǳ ⅔ Ⅺ
Compatibility
Obsolete and other Unicode characters that should be avoided

𓃾 𐤀 Α 𐌀 A 𓀠 𐤄 Ε 𐌄
Alphabet family tree

Alphabet family tree with comments
An overview of the history and development of the alphabet

🖮 ↹ ⌫ ⏎ ⇦ A B c 1
Keyboard
Proposal for a harmonised keyboard for all languages based on the Latin alphabet (work in progress)

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Links
Good and useful links related to typography