That means there is no pre-made “anti-LGBT” flag, only one that appears when your device applies the character combining rules to the text you just entered. Unicode allows fonts to either use pre-made combined characters or rely on the standard’s rules for combining characters. You’ve probably seen combined characters before, like the acute accent combination in “Pokémon,” or the umlaut combination in the German word “schön.” The “no symbol” ⃠ itself is categorized in Unicode as a “combining character,” meaning it’s designed to overlay the preceding character. Unicode provides a standard way to represent text in multiple languages, symbols, and emoji by assigning each character - emoji included - a unique identification number that can be displayed by the font installed on your device.įor the officially designated “international prohibition sign,” that identification number is U+20E0. Its members include individuals as well as major corporations like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. The reason you can see symbols like the “no sign” ⃠, your favorite emoji, accents in a French city name, or Japanese kanji on an online storefront, is the Unicode Standard, created by the Unicode Consortium.
