BabelMap Help : Tools : Character Properties

Tools > Character Properties

Select Tools > Character Properties... from the menu to launch the Character Properties dialog box. Alternatively press the ? button or hit F9. This dialog shows the main properties for the currently selected character in the character grid.

Character Properties dialog box

General Information

This section provides general information about the name and history of the character.

Block Name. This is the name of the block of characters that the character is located in (see Blocks.txt).
Script. This is the name of the script that the character is classified as belong to (see Scripts.txt). Characters that occur in more than one script or are not specific to a single script (such as symbols) usually have the script property of "Common". Combining marks that are not specific to a single script usually have the script property of "Inherited" indicating that they inherit the script of the base character to which they are attached.
Character Name. This is the official, immutable name of the character.
Formal Aliases. These are formal character names aliases of the character (and like character names they are immutable). Formal aliases are only defined for control characters and for a very few characters with egregiously incorrect names, such as serious spelling errors (e.g. "BRAKCET" for "BRACKET" in the name of U+FE18) or seriously misleading names (e.g. in the case of U+A015 which is misnamed "YI SYLLABLE WU" when in fact it s a syllable iteration mark). Formal aliases may be used in place of the official character name by applications that expose the character names to end users. Other informal aliases may also be listed under "Notes, Aliases and Cross-References".
Abbreviations. These are formal abbreviations for certain characters, mostly control characters and format characters. For example, U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE has the formal abbreviation "NBSP". Formal aliases are unique within the Unicode character name namespace.
Unicode 1.0 Name. This the name that was originally defined for the character in Unicode version 1.0. As a result of the merger between the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards a large number of Unicode characters were renamed in Unicode version 1.1. After the version 1.1, the only characters to be renamed were U+00C6 and U+00E6, which were renamed in version 2.0 from "LATIN CAPITAL/SMALL LIGATURE AE" to "LATIN CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER AE". Character Encoding Stability Policies were then imposed, which means that since version 2.0 characters cannot be moved or removed, and character names may not be changed. The Unicode 1.0 name given in BabelMap is the actual name given in the Unicode Standard v. 1.0, which in the case of some control characters differs from the Unicode 1 Name property (the Unicode 1 Name property is given in the Extended Character Properties dialog).
Introduced in Version. This is the Unicode version that the character was introduced at this code point. If the character was introduced at a different code point in Unicode version 1.0, and was subsequently moved (or removed and later readded) to the current code point, an asterisk is added after the version number, in which case you can check the Character History for more details. The date that the specified version of Unicode was released in added in parentheses after the version number.
Character History. Press this button to open the Character History dialog which lists the core Unicode properties of the character for each major version of the Unicode Standard.

Basic Properties

This section lists the key properties of the character, as defined in the Unicode Character Database.

General Category. This is the General Category of the character.
Canonical Combining Class. This is the Canonical Combining Class of the character.
Bidi Class. This is the Bidirectional Class of the character.
Bidi Mirrored? This is "Yes" if the character has the Bidi Mirrored property, otherwise "No".
Line Break. This is the Line Break property of the character.
Decomposition Type. This is the Decomposition Type of the character.
Mapping. This is the decomposition mapping for the character if it has a Decomposition Type that is not null (see Unicode Data).
Numeric Type. This is the Numeric Type of the character.
Numeric Value. This is the Numeric Value of the character is it has a Numeric Type that is not null.
Joining Type. This is the Joining Type of the character.
Joining Group. This is the Joining Group of the character.

Case Mapping

This section provides case mappings for characters that belong to a bicameral script.

Lower. This is the code point of the corresponding simple lower case form of the character.
Upper. This is the code point of the corresponding simple upper case form of the character.
Title. This is the code point of the corresponding simple title case form of the character. For all but a handful of characters the title case form is the same as the upper case form. An exampe of a title-cased character is U+01F2 ǲ, which is he title case form of U+01F3 ǳ (lower case) and U+01F1 Ǳ (upper case).

Encoding

This section gives the hexadecimal vaues of the character in various Unicode transformation formats.

UTF-8. The hexadecimal value of the character in UTF-8 (1 through 4 8-bit bytes).
UTF-16. The hexadecimal value of the character in UTF-16 (1 or 2 16-bit words).
UTF-32. The hexadecimal value of the character in UTF-32 (1 32-bit word).

Notes, Aliases and Cross-References

This section lists the informal notes, aliases and cross-references for the character in the Unicode code charts (the data is extracted from the Names List).

Binary Properties

This section lists the binary properties that are defined for the character.

Variation Sequences

This section lists any variation sequences that are defined for the character (either as a base character or as a variation selector character). They may either be Standardized Variation Sequences or Ideographic Variation Sequences (the latter are only valid for CJK unified ideographs).

Named Sequences

This section lists any named sequences that include this character.