Unicode input is the insertion of a specific Unicode character on a computer by a

user; it is a common way to input characters not directly supported by a physical

keyboard. Unicode characters can be produced either by selecting them from a
display or by typing a certain sequence of keys on a physical keyboard. In addition, a
character produced by one of these methods in one web page or document can be
copied into another. Unicode is similar to ASCII but provides many more options and
encodes many more signs.[1]
A Unicode input system needs to provide a large repertoire of characters, ideally all
valid Unicode code points. This is different from a keyboard layout which defines
keys and their combinations only for a limited number of characters appropriate for a
certain locale.
Unicode characters are distinguished by code points, which are conventionally
represented by "U+" followed by four, five or six hexadecimal digits, for example
U+00AE or U+1D310. Characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), containing
modern scripts – including many Chinese and Japanese characters – and many
symbols, have a 4-digit code. Historic scripts, but also many modern symbols and
pictographs (such as emoticons, playing cards and many CJK characters) have 5-digit
codes.
Availability[edit]
An application can display a character only if it can access a font which contains a
glyph for the character.[2] Very few fonts have full Unicode coverage; most only
contain the glyphs needed to support a few writing systems. However, most modern
browsers and other text-processing applications are able to display multilingual
content because they perform font substitution, automatically switching to a fallback
font when necessary to display characters which are not supported in the current font.
Which fonts are used for fallback and the thoroughness of Unicode coverage varies
by software and operating system; some software will search for a suitable glyph in
all of the installed fonts, others only search within certain fonts.
If an application does not have access to a font supporting a character, the character
will usually be shown as a question mark or another generic replacement character,
e.g. or  .

Selection from a screen[edit]

 GNOME Character Map
Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755
refers to this as a screen-selection entry method.[3]
Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program,
appearing in the consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic
Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and
the table can be limited to a particular code block.[4]
More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable
freeware example is BabelMap, which supports all Unicode characters).[5]
In macOS the "Emoji & Symbols" (⌘ Command+Ctrl+Space) menu can be found in the
Edit menu in many programs. This brings up the Characters palette allowing the user
to choose any character from a variety of views. The user can also search for the
character or Unicode plane by name.[6][7]
On most Linux desktop environments, equivalent tools – such as gucharmap
(GNOME) or kcharselect (KDE) – are available.[8]