Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Private Use Areas
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+E000–U+F8FF), and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16 (U+F0000–U+FFFFD, U+100000–U+10FFFD). They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may assign their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Standard assignments. Under the Unicode Stability Policy, the Private Use Areas will remain allocated for that purpose in all future Unicode versions.
Assignments to private-use code points need not be "private" in the sense of strictly internal to an organisation; a number of assignment schemes have been published by several organisations. Such publication may include a font that supports the definition (showing the glyphs), and software making use of the private-use characters (e.g., a graphics character for a "print document" function). By definition, multiple private parties may assign different characters to the same code point, with the consequence that a user may see one private character from an installed font where a different one was intended.
Under the Unicode definition, code points in the Private Use Areas are not noncharacters, reserved, or unassigned. Their category is "Other, private use (Co)", and no character names are specified. No representative glyphs are provided, and character semantics are left to private agreement.
Private-use characters are assigned Unicode code points whose interpretation is not specified by this standard and whose use may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users. These characters are designated for private use and do not have defined, interpretable semantics except by private agreement. ... No charts are provided for private-use characters, as any such characters are, by their very nature, defined only outside the context of this standard.
There are three PUA blocks in Unicode.
In the Basic Multilingual Plane (plane 0), the block titled Private Use Area (PUA) has 6400 code points.
Planes 15 and 16 are almost entirely assigned to two further Private Use Areas: Supplementary Private Use Area-A (SPUA-A) and Supplementary Private Use Area-B (SPUA-B). In UTF-16 a subset of the high surrogates (U+DB80..U+DBFF) is used for these and only these planes, and are called High Private Use Surrogates.
In Unicode 1.0.0, the Private Use Area extended from U+E800 to U+FDFF (i.e. did not include U+E000..E7FF, but additionally included the U+F900..FDFF range now occupied by CJK Compatibility Ideographs, Alphabetic Presentation Forms and Arabic Presentation Forms-A). This was changed to U+E000..F8FF in Unicode 1.0.1, and remained so in Unicode 1.1. The range U+D800..DFFF, used for UTF-16 surrogates since Unicode 2.0, was unassigned and not part of the Private Use Area in any Unicode 1.x version.
Hub AI
Private Use Areas AI simulator
(@Private Use Areas_simulator)
Private Use Areas
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+E000–U+F8FF), and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16 (U+F0000–U+FFFFD, U+100000–U+10FFFD). They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may assign their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Standard assignments. Under the Unicode Stability Policy, the Private Use Areas will remain allocated for that purpose in all future Unicode versions.
Assignments to private-use code points need not be "private" in the sense of strictly internal to an organisation; a number of assignment schemes have been published by several organisations. Such publication may include a font that supports the definition (showing the glyphs), and software making use of the private-use characters (e.g., a graphics character for a "print document" function). By definition, multiple private parties may assign different characters to the same code point, with the consequence that a user may see one private character from an installed font where a different one was intended.
Under the Unicode definition, code points in the Private Use Areas are not noncharacters, reserved, or unassigned. Their category is "Other, private use (Co)", and no character names are specified. No representative glyphs are provided, and character semantics are left to private agreement.
Private-use characters are assigned Unicode code points whose interpretation is not specified by this standard and whose use may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users. These characters are designated for private use and do not have defined, interpretable semantics except by private agreement. ... No charts are provided for private-use characters, as any such characters are, by their very nature, defined only outside the context of this standard.
There are three PUA blocks in Unicode.
In the Basic Multilingual Plane (plane 0), the block titled Private Use Area (PUA) has 6400 code points.
Planes 15 and 16 are almost entirely assigned to two further Private Use Areas: Supplementary Private Use Area-A (SPUA-A) and Supplementary Private Use Area-B (SPUA-B). In UTF-16 a subset of the high surrogates (U+DB80..U+DBFF) is used for these and only these planes, and are called High Private Use Surrogates.
In Unicode 1.0.0, the Private Use Area extended from U+E800 to U+FDFF (i.e. did not include U+E000..E7FF, but additionally included the U+F900..FDFF range now occupied by CJK Compatibility Ideographs, Alphabetic Presentation Forms and Arabic Presentation Forms-A). This was changed to U+E000..F8FF in Unicode 1.0.1, and remained so in Unicode 1.1. The range U+D800..DFFF, used for UTF-16 surrogates since Unicode 2.0, was unassigned and not part of the Private Use Area in any Unicode 1.x version.