Variation Selectors is a Unicode block containing 16 variation selectors used to specify a glyph variant for a preceding character. They are currently used to specify standardized variation sequences for mathematical symbols, emoji symbols, 'Phags-pa letters, and CJK unified ideographs corresponding to CJK compatibility ideographs. At present only standardized variation sequences with VS1, VS2, VS3, VS15 and VS16 have been defined; VS15 and VS16 are reserved to request that a character should be displayed as text or as an emoji respectively.[3] [4]
These combining characters are named variation selector-1 (for U+FE00) through to variation selector-16 (U+FE0F), and are abbreviated VS1 – VS16. Each applies to the immediately preceding character.
As of Unicode 13.0:[5]
This list is continued in the Variation Selectors Supplement.
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Variation Selectors block:
| Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.2 | U+FE00..FE0F | 16 | ||||
| html) | ||||||
| N2403 | ||||||