On Jul 30, 2015, at 10:40 AM, Eric Muller <eric.muller@efele.net> wrote:
Furthermore, if I am not mistaken, U+2116 № NUMERO SIGN was introduced in Unicode for compatibility with East Asian character sets, and probably would not have been encoded on its own merit.
I just looked it up in the unicode docs: Numero Sign. U+2116 numero sign is provided both for Cyrillic use, where it looks like XXX [I was unable to get the character to appear here -- it looks like the first glyph in the attachment], and for compatibility with Asian standards, where it looks like XXX [the second glyph in the attachement]. Figure 15-2 illustrates a number of alternative glyphs for this sign. Instead of using a special symbol, French practice is to use an “N” or an “n”, according to context, followed by a superscript small letter “o” (No or no; plural Nos or nos). Legacy data encoded in ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) or other 8-bit character sets may also have represented the numero sign by a sequence of “N” followed by the degree sign (U+00B0 degree sign). Implementations interworking with legacy data should be aware of such alternative representations for the numero sign when converting data.