I searched the unicode names for occurrences of "FOUR" and "FIVE" but didn't find anything. Nothing also when googling "unicode unary numbers".
Does anyone know unicode symbols for these?
For characters with multiple strokes in one, you can use counting rod numerals (U+1D360 through U+1D371) and Roman numerals (U+2160 through U+2186).
Unicode Surrogate Pair UTF-8 Description Sample
——————— —————————————— ————— ——————————— ——————
U+1D360 U+D834 U+DF60 F0 9D 8D A0 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT ONE 𝍠
U+1D361 U+D834 U+DF61 F0 9D 8D A1 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT TWO 𝍡
U+1D362 U+D834 U+DF62 F0 9D 8D A2 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT THREE 𝍢
....... ...... ...... .. .. .. .. ........ ... .... ..... ..... .
U+1D371 U+D834 U+DF71 F0 9D 8D B1 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT NINE 𝍱
Unicode UTF-8 Description Sample
——————— ————— ——————————— ——————
U+2160 E2 85 A0 ROMAN NUMERAL ONE Ⅰ
U+2161 E2 85 A1 ROMAN NUMERAL TWO Ⅱ
U+2162 E2 85 A2 ROMAN NUMERAL THREE Ⅲ
...... .. .. .. ..... ....... ..... .
U+2186 E2 86 86 ROMAN NUMERAL FIFTY EARLY FORM ↆ
You can use a combining mark to place a slash through any multi-stroke character. They should work with the counting rods and Roman numerals, but as with all fancy Unicode, browser and OS support may vary.
Unicode UTF-8 Description Sample
——————— ————— ——————————— ——————
U+0335 CC B5 COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY ̵
U+0336 CC B6 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY ̶
U+0337 CC B7 COMBINING SHORT SOLIDUS OVERLAY ̷
U+0338 CC B8 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY ̸
U+20D2 E2 83 92 COMBINING LONG VERTICAL LINE OVERLAY ⃒
U+20D3 E2 83 93 COMBINING SHORT VERTICAL LINE OVERLAY ⃓
Here are the counting rods with the various combining stroke marks. They may or may not render in your browser. For me, only COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY seems to work well, even though they all display (Firefox 47 Mac).
𝍠 𝍡 𝍢 𝍣 𝍣̵
𝍠 𝍡 𝍢 𝍣 𝍣̶
𝍠 𝍡 𝍢 𝍣 𝍣̷
𝍠 𝍡 𝍢 𝍣 𝍣̸
𝍩 𝍪 𝍫 𝍬 𝍬⃒
𝍩 𝍪 𝍫 𝍬 𝍬⃓
𝍩 𝍪 𝍫 𝍬 𝍬̷
𝍩 𝍪 𝍫 𝍬 𝍬̸
Unfortunately, combining marks aren't always an option depending on the application. And many fonts lack them, though the OS will usually try to use whichever font has an otherwise missing Unicode character. Arial Unicode MS, Courier, Courier New, Geneva, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Tahoma, and Times New Roman are good bets for finding natively-included oddball glyphs like this.
Here's a quick hack to get tick marks in pure HTML and CSS.
<style>
x-1::before, x-2::before, x-3::before, x-4::before, x-5::before {
letter-spacing: 0.1pt; margin: 0.25em;
}
x-1::before { content: "|"; }
x-2::before { content: "||"; }
x-3::before { content: "|||"; }
x-4::before { content: "||||"; }
x-5::before { content: "|||||"; }
x-5::after { content: "╱"; margin-left: -1.5em; }
</style>
<x-1/><x-2/><x-3/><x-4/><x-5/>
https://jsfiddle.net/b7z1mLj4/
As a side note, Unary numbers by definition have only one numeral, which is traditionally a vertical line. If you use single characters to represent the numbers 1 𝍠, 2 𝍡, 3 𝍢, 4 𝍣, and 5 𝍤, then what you have is a quintary (base-5) numeral system. Four-with-slash is not really a unary digit, but just a convenience for readability. It's akin to a space or comma when writing decimal numbers like 1,000,000.
That said, Unicode does have the comma symbol (and other flourishes), so you raise a great point over why there's no four-with-slash character. Especially since they have the counting rods.