The book of stones and the keyboard

A lapidary was a medieval genre of book: the catalogue of precious stones, one per entry, with each gem's likeness, its virtues and the way to call upon it. This site borrows the genre — the holdings here are characters that typography cut over five centuries and that Unicode set, each in its own code point.

Why the keyboard hides them

The typewriter was a bargain of scarcity: a few dozen keys for all of text. The bargain flattened typography — one hyphen came to stand in for the em dash, the en dash and the minus; one straight quote swallowed six curves; a single space replaced the compositor's whole case of blanks.

The computer keyboard inherited the bargain, and the true characters went on existing — first in the lead of the print shops, then in the Unicode charts. They are all one shortcut away; they just aren't painted on any key. That is this collection's rarity: no gem here is rare in the holdings, all of them are rare in use.

How to call them

Each gem's label answers four ways: the macOS shortcut, the Windows code, the HTML entity and the code point — the universal call, which works where the others fall short. The names and numbers come from the Unicode charts, the official catalogue, pointed to on every label.

Why lots of little pages

For the same reason as the herbarium and the reliquary: every gem, every drawer, every ordering and this very text are separate HTML files, linked together, written by a generator a few hundred lines long. State becomes an address; the browser handles the rest.