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In ISO/IEC 646 (commonly known as ASCII) and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise displayed in a form that can be read by humans. In other words, it is any encoded character that is associated with one or more glyphs.
ISO/IEC 646
In ISO 646, graphic characters are contained in rows 2 through 7 of the code table. However, two of the characters in these rows, namely the space character SP at row 2 column 0 and the delete character DEL (also called the rubout character) at row 7 column 15, require special mention.
The space is considered to be both a graphic character and a control character in ISO 646; this is probably due to it having a visible form on computer terminals but a control function (of moving the print head) on teletypes.
The delete character is strictly a control character, not a graphic character. This is true not only in ISO 646, but also in all related standards including Unicode. However, many modern character sets deviate from ISO 646, and as a result a graphic character might occupy the position originally reserved for the delete character.
Unicode
In Unicode, Graphic characters are those with General Category Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol or Zs=space. Other code points (Gewneral categories Control, Zl=line separator, Zp=paragraph separator) are Format, Control, Private Use, Surrogate, Noncharacter or Reserved (unassigned).
References
- http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch02.pdf#G25564 Chapter 2, table 2.3