This book uses the Unicode naming convention for characters. For example, the lowercase character ‘a’ is more formally specified as either LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A or U+0041. The U+xxxx notation refers to a particular code point in the Unicode standard, where xxxx stands for the hexadecimal representation of the 16-bit value defined in the standard.
In parts of the book, it is convenient to use a symbol to represent a special character, or a particular class of characters. This is particularly true in discussion of the following Japanese character encodings.