A little while back, I was reading some text when I realized the hyphens didn’t look quite right. A little too wide, I thought. Not em-dash wide, but still…wide. Wide-ish? But when I copied some of the text into a BBEdit window, they looked just like the hyphens I typed into the document.
Of course, I know Unicode is filled with all manner of symbols and that the appearance of those symbols can vary from one font face to another. So I changed the font face, made the size really huge, and behold: they were indeed different characters. At this point, I was really curious about what I’d found. What exactly was it? How would I find out?
For the record, here’s the character in question:
Googling “−” and “− Unicode” got me nothing useful. I knew I could try the Character Viewer in OS X, and eventually I did, but I was wondering if there was a better (read: lazier) solution. I asked the Twittersphere for advice, and while I don’t know if these solutions are any lazier, here are the best of the suggestions I received.
- Unicode Lookup, a site that lets you input or paste in any character and get a report on what it is and how one might call it in various encodings.
- Richard Ishida’s UniView Lite, which does much the same as Unicode Lookup with the caveat that once you’ve input your character, you have to hit the “Chars” button, not the “Search” button. The latter is apparently how you search Unicode character names for a word or other string, like “dash” or “quot”.
- UnicodeChecker (OS X), a nice utility that includes a character list pane as well as the ability to type or paste a character into an input and instantly get its gritty details.
Any of those will tell you that the − in question is MINUS SIGN, codepoint 8722 (decimal) / 2212 (UTF-16 hex) / U+2212 (Unicode hex) / et cetera, et cetera. Did you know it was designated in Unicode 1.1? Now you do, thanks to UnicodeChecker and this post. You’re welcome.
Update 2 Mar 12: Philippe Wittenberg points out in the comments that you can add a UnicodeChecker service. With that enabled, all you have to do is highlight a character, summon the contextual menu (right-click, for most of us), and have it shown in UnicodeChecker. Now that’s the kind of laziness I was trying to attain!