Glyph for U+203B Source: Noto Sans
U+203B Reference Mark
U+203B was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block U+2000 to U+206F General Punctuation U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane
This character is a Other Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as Japanese kome and Urdu paragraph separator .
The glyph is not a composition . Its width in East Asian texts is determined by its context . It can be displayed wide or narrow. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral . When changing direction it is not mirrored . If its East Asian Width is “narrow”, U+203B forms a word with similar characters, which prevents a line break inside it. Otherwise it allows line breaks around it, except in some numeric contexts.
The CLDR project calls this character “reference mark” for use in screen reading software.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The reference mark or reference symbol "※ " is a typographic mark or word used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) writing.
The symbol was used historically to call attention to an important sentence or idea, such as a prologue or footnote. As an indicator of a note, the mark serves the same purpose as the asterisk in English. However, in Japanese usage, the note text is placed directly into the main text immediately after the reference mark, rather than at the bottom of the page or end of chapter as is the case in English writing.
Representations
System
Representation
Nº
8251
UTF-8
E2 80 BB
UTF-16
20 3B
UTF-32
00 00 20 3B
URL-Quoted
%E2%80%BB
HTML hex reference
※
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
※
alias
Japanese kome
alias
Urdu paragraph separator
Encoding: EUC-KR (hex bytes)
A1 D8
Encoding: JIS0208 (hex bytes)
A2 A8
Adobe Glyph List
referencemark
digraph
:X
Complete Record
Property
Value
Age (age)
1.1 (1993)
Unicode Name (na)
REFERENCE MARK
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
—
Block (blk)
General Punctuation
General Category (gc)
Other Punctuation
Script (sc)
Common
Bidirectional Category (bc)
Other Neutral
Combining Class (ccc)
Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt)
none
Decomposition Mapping (dm)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Lowercase (Lower)
✘
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Lowercase Mapping (lc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Uppercase (Upper)
✘
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Uppercase Mapping (uc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Titlecase Mapping (tc)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Case Folding (cf)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
✘
Alphabetic (Alpha)
✘
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
✘
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
✘
Composition Exclusion (CE)
✘
Case Ignorable (CI)
✘
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
✘
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
✘
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
✘
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
✘
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
✘
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
✘
Cased (Cased)
✘
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
✘
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
✘
Dash (Dash)
✘
Deprecated (Dep)
✘
Diacritic (Dia)
✘
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
✘
Emoji Component (EComp)
✘
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
✘
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
✘
Emoji (Emoji)
✘
Extender (Ext)
✘
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
✘
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB)
Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
✔
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
✘
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
✘
Hex Digit (Hex)
✘
Hyphen (Hyphen)
✘
ID Continue (IDC)
✘
ID Start (IDS)
✘
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
✘
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
✘
IDSU (IDSU)
0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue)
0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start)
0
Ideographic (Ideo)
✘
InCB (InCB)
None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
—
Indic Positional Category (InPC)
NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC)
Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
—
Join Control (Join_C)
✘
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
✘
Math (Math)
✘
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
✘
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC)
Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC)
Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC)
Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC)
Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
✘
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
✘
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
✘
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
✘
Other ID Start (OIDS)
✘
Other Lowercase (OLower)
✘
Other Math (OMath)
✘
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
✘
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
✘
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
✔
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
✘
Quotation Mark (QMark)
✘
Regional Indicator (RI)
✘
Radical (Radical)
✘
Sentence Break (SB)
Other
Soft Dotted (SD)
✘
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
✘
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
✘
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
✘
Variation Selector (VS)
✘
Word Break (WB)
Other
White Space (WSpace)
✘
XID Continue (XIDC)
✘
XID Start (XIDS)
✘
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
✘
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
✘
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
✘
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
✘
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt)
None
East Asian Width (ea)
ambiguous
Hangul Syllable Type (hst)
Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
—
Joining Group (jg)
No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt)
Non Joining
Line Break (lb)
Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic)
Numeric Type (nt)
none
Numeric Value (nv)
not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf)
Glyph for U+203B Reference Mark
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo)
U