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Private use area (PUA) characters and End-user-defined characters (EUDCs)

Private use area (PUA) characters in Unicode, or End-user-defined characters (EUDC) in double-byte character sets (DBCSs) are custom characters that can be defined by individuals and organizations, such as equipment manufacturers, user groups, government bodies, or font publishers. Their use enables users to form names and other words using characters that aren't available in standard screen and printer fonts.

Unicode has three defined ranges for private-use characters.

  • BMP: U+E000..U+F8FF
  • Plane 15: U+F0000..U+FFFFD and U+100000..U+10FFFD
  • Plane 16: U+F0000..U+FFFFD and U+100000..U+10FFFD

Since the same code points in the PUA can be defined by different individuals or organizations, you can't assume that any given code point in the PUA represents the same character for different implementations. Shared use of the PUA must be defined by “private agreement”; users of characters implemented in the PUA have a common understanding of the characters and their code points.

PUA characters and fonts

Given that the characters are user defined, the same code point might have different meanings in different contexts. An end-user needs to have the appropriate font to display the character they're expecting. For example, many web designers create a symbol web font for site icons. These fonts might make use of the PUA ranges to encode their symbols.

To create a PUA character, select a character value within any of the desired ranges and add a glyph to a font that corresponds to that character value. Any Unicode font can contain PUA characters; however, your ability to add characters to a third-party font might be limited by the font’s license agreement.

A font is called a "separate" PUA font if it contains only PUA characters. A font is an "integrated" PUA font if it contains standard characters and PUA characters.

If you're distributing documents containing characters supported by the PUA, you need to ensure that the recipients also have the font that supports the characters.