Ideographic Description Characters
All code points in the Ideographic Description Characters block.
Tips
- Analyze IDC by breaking ideographs into left-right or top-bottom layouts using standard IDC components.
- Validate glyphs against rendering systems that support IDC to ensure correct composition.
- Pair IDC with a consistent font or provide clear fallbacks to avoid misalignment of markers.
- Document component names and positions to aid accessibility and search.
- Cross-reference related blocks like Geometric Shapes and Box Drawing when designing IDC tools.
Ideographic Description Characters provide a way to describe complex characters by their parts. They are used in font design, input methods, and scholarly descriptions. They rely on a small set of positional markers and component blocks to express structure.
Common pitfalls include assuming a fixed glyph form across fonts, misplacing markers, or ignoring writing direction. Historically, IDC emerged as a practical method to model hanzi and related scripts without full glyphs, helping developers reason about composition and decomposition in scalable environments.