LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Unicode: Unicode Characters
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Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters — graphemes and grapheme-like units — rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).
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In Unicode, some characters are mirrored. This means that their images are mirrored horizontally in text that is laid out from right to left. For instance, "(" would become its mirror image, ")", in right-to-left text.
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The Unicode specification includes a database of information about code points. For each code point that's defined, the information includes the character's name, its category, the numeric value if applicable (Unicode has characters representing the Roman numerals and fractions such as one-third and four-fifths). There are ... properties related to the code point's use in bidirectional text and other display-related properties.
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Reason for inclusion: The interlinear annotation characters were included in Unicode only in order to reserve code points for very frequent application-internal use. The interlinear annotation characters are used to delimit interlinear annotations in contexts where other delimiters are not available, and where non-textual means exist to carry formatting information. Many text-processing applications store the text and the associated markup (or in some cases styling information) of a document in separate structures. The actual text is kept in a single linear structure; additional information is kept separately with pointers to the appropriate text positions. This is called out-of-band information. The overall implementation makes sure that these two structures are kept in sync.
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If you need a different character, you can use Unipad (http://www.unipad.org) which is a basic Unicode text editor, or cut and paste from a web site that already displays, in Unicode, the characters you want. IPA characters can be found at http://linguistlist.org/unicode/ipa.html
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When the module tries to convert Unicode string to Shift_JIS, it represents most letters which isn't available in Shift_JIS as decimal character reference ('&#dddd;'). There is one exception to this: every graphic characters for mobile phones are replaced with '?' mark.
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Unicode Characters