Hi Stefan,
Actually, you're making an understandable but incorrect assumption. The various units characters that look exactly like "normal" characters or sequences of characters you find scattered around Unicode are there for one reason only: they provide compatibility with existing (legacy) character sets. If you look even more closely at the Unicode character database, you'll find that most of these characters have "pointers" back to the "real" character. That's why you find most of them in blocks called "compatibility"---they only exist to provide backward compatibility (round trip conversion to and from) existing character sets and encodings. In UNICHAR.TXT, look at the last fields (for Normalization Form KC and KD respectively) and you'll see that U+212B is mapped to U+00c5. You'll also see that the "kg" sign in CJK, for example, is mapped to the letter "k" followed by the letter "g".
So, the short answer to your question is: the symbol for "Newton" is the letter "N" or U+004E, since no one saw fit to create a separate character called "newton" that looked just like an "N", but with a different semantic meaning prior to the creation of Unicode. And there should not be one created now, because the letter "N" contains all of the useful information necessary for that purpose.
Best Regards,
Addison
Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect / Manager, Globalization Engineering
webMethods, Inc. 432 Lakeside Drive, Sunnyvale, CA
+1 408.962.5487 (phone) +1 408.210.3659 (mobile)
-------------------------------------------------
Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
Behalf Of Stefan Persson
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 8:59 AM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: What code point is assigned for the Newton unit?
Hi!
I recently noticed, that the Unicode does difference between the Swedish
capital letter "Å" (U+00C5; Å) and the Ångström sign (U+212B; Å). So it
seems that every unit sign has got it's own code point, while the Latin
letters with exactly identical shape to those have other code points. For
example, the CJK Compatibility block contains some unit signs (in katakana):
㌂: anpea/Ampère
㌕: kiroguramu/kilogram
etc.
So, can someone tell me the code points for the Newton unit sign (which
looks exactly like an "N")? And can someone tell me why it's necessary to do
this difference?
"Ångström" is spelled wrong on the code charts at Unicode's home page, BTW.
Stefan
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Sep 12 2001 - 13:14:08 EDT