What are special characters? (2)
- Category: English content
- Published: Saturday, 16 April 2016 22:01
Help, special characters! –
What are special characters?
A service from special characters help
Special characters are called all letters and characters beyond the 26 basic letters of the Latin alphabet. This refers to both symbols (§ / # $ % [ } + @ € …) as well as additional letters (ð ə ĸ ŋ þ …), ligatures of two letters (& ß æ œ …), and especially to letters with so-called diacritics, signs that are placed over, under, or in the middle of letters (ü á ô è ñ å ç ø š ę ć ė ķ ł …).
In the European Latin alphabets alone, there are a total of (taking into account upper and lower case) about 360 letters with diacritics, plus Latin diacritics for Vietnamese, African languages etc.
In electronic data processing, letters with diacritics may still cause some problems, because older computer programs can only process 256 (ISO-8859) or even only 128 (ASCII) different characters.
In contrast, modern applications use a character set called Unicode that contains virtually all characters in the world. So all special characters can be displayed and processed without any problems – as long as also the fonts are Unicode-enabled.
More about diacritics