UTF 16 code for a degree symbol - utf-16

I need to put a degree symbol on my html page. It will be read from a property file. So I need to figure out the UTF-16 encoding for a degree symbol as superscript.
What is the UTF-16 for something like N* where N is a random number and * is supposed to be the symbol

You will find all the data you need here. In particular you can use ° to embed degree sign in your html page.

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Where are named pdf characters defined like "f_f", "uni00D0" and "a204"?

I'm trying to read the official pdf specification "Document management — Portable document format — Part 1: PDF 1.7" (PDF32000_2008.pdf) as bytes and then interpret them according to that specification.
In Annex D, Character Sets and Encodings, there is a list of all named characters, like:
or
When I parse PDF32000_2008.pdf, there are also named characters like "f_f", "uni00D0" and "a204", which are missing in that specification.
My guess is that "f_f" is a symbol for two 'f' characters, which might get printed with a special glyph. There is a unicode "Latin Small Ligature Ff" for 'ff'.
For example, there is also "f_i" in that file, which I expect to mean 'fi', one glyph showing the 2 characters 'f' and 'i'. However, the pdf specification has 'fi' as named character "fi" and what is the point for having 2 named characters pointing to the same symbol ?
I can imagine that "uni00D0" means the unicode character 'Ð'. However, pdf defines it already as named character "Eth"
What could be "a204" ? Maybe Ansi 204 'Ì', which also has already a named character "Igrave" ?
Why do they use also "a62", which would be just a '<' ?
However, my main question is: Where can I find a specification for these additional named characters ?
Of course, Adobe Acrobat understands them, but also Gmail seems not to have a problem with them. So I guess, their meaning must be specified somewhere.

Pdf Text wrong character extraction

I have a pdf page with a formula as:
When text is extracted, few characters are wrong. Text looks like this:
/ToUnicode Object 33 0 R unfiltered stream looks like this:
Encoding looks like this:
Rendering instructions are below:
Unicode Vulgar Fraction One Quarter (1/4) or 00bc seems to be rendered as Equals Sign (003d).
Is this information searchable in the pdf so that I can extract the proper character? Where is it located?
I've changed the question so it's not too broad.

PDF extracted text seems to be unreadable

Situation: I've a PDF using version 1.6. In that PDF, there are several streams. There were compressed text (Flate) in that streams, so I decompressed these streams. After that, I extracted the Tj-parts of the corresponding, decompressed streams. I assumed that there would be readable text between the brackets before the Tj command, but the result was the following:
Actual Question: As I have no idea, what I've got thre, I would like to know what type of content it is. Furthermore: Is it possible to get a plain text out of these string or do I need further information to extract plain texts?
Further research: The PDFs, which I try to analyze where generated by iTextSharp (seems to be an C# Library for generating PDFs). Don't know whether it is a relevant information, but it might be that that Library uses a special way of encrypt it's text data or something...
I assumed that there would be readable text between the brackets before the Tj command
This assumption only holds for simple PDFs.
To quote from the PDF specification (ISO 32000-1):
A string operand of a text-showing operator shall be interpreted as a sequence of character codes identifying the glyphs to be painted.
With a simple font, each byte of the string shall be treated as a separate character code. The character code shall then be looked up in the font’s encoding to select the glyph, as described in 9.6.6, "Character Encoding".
With a composite font (PDF 1.2), multiple-byte codes may be used to select glyphs. In this instance, one or more consecutive bytes of the string shall be treated as a single character code. The code lengths and the mappings from codes to glyphs are defined in a data structure called a CMap, described in 9.7, "Composite Fonts".
(Section 9.4.3 - Text-Showing Operators - ISO 32000-1)
Thus,
I would like to know what type of content it is.
As quoted above, these "strings" consist of single-byte or multi-byte character codes. These codes depend on the current font's encoding. Each font object in a PDF can have a different encoding.
Those encodings may be some standard encoding (MacRomanEncoding, MacExpertEncoding, or WinAnsiEncoding) or some custom encoding. In particular in case of embedded font subsets you often find encodings where 1 is the code of the first glyph drawn on a page, 2 is the code for the second, different glyph, 3 for the third, different one, etc.
Furthermore: Is it possible to get a plain text out of these string or do I need further information to extract plain texts?
As the encoding of the string arguments of text showing instructions depends on the current font, you at least need to keep track of the current font name (Tf instruction) and look up encoding information (Encoding or ToUnicode map) from the current font object.
Section 9.10 - Extraction of Text Content - of ISO 32000-1 explains this in some more detail.
Furthermore, the order of the text showing instructions need not be the order of reading. The word "Hello" can e.g. be shown by first drawing the 'o', then going left, then the 'el', then again left, then the 'H', then going right, and finally the remaining 'l'. And two words need not be separated by a space glyph, there simply might be a text positioning instruction going right a bit.
Thus, in general you also have to keep track of the position of the separate strings drawn.

Defining the contents of a URL

I have a web site which contains forms for my customers to download. They are constantly telling me that the %20 listed in the url when they are looking at a form means there is a 20% discount on the items listed on the form. The following url is what is displayed in one example. Can you explain to me what the %20 means in this url? http://www.schumachersuniforms.com/form/Atonement%20PreK.pdf
Percent Encoding
A URL cannot contain certain characters. The SPACE character is one of the those forbidden chapters.
Your PDF document is apparently named with a SPACE in the middle, Atonement PreK.pdf.
Percent Encoding, also known as URL Encoding, is a way to replace the offending characters with a sequence of other characters. That sequence begins with a PERCENT SIGN character. A hexadecimal number of the character’s code point follows.
The decimal code point for SPACE is 32, the hex is 20. So the string %20 substitutes for the SPACE.
No way around this:
If you really don't want the %20, then avoid naming your PDF document with space characters. Example: AtonementPreK.pdf.
Or use a more sophisticated web scheme for handling the URL triggering a download other than directly referencing the file name.
Do not confuse URL encoding with HTML (and XML) character entity references.

Is there a field in which PDF files specify their encoding?

I understand that it is impossible to determine the character encoding of any stringform data just by looking at the data. This is not my question.
My question is: Is there a field in a PDF file where, by convention, the encoding scheme is specified (e.g.: UTF-8)? This would be something roughly analogous to <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> in HTML.
Thank you very much in advance,
Blz
A quick look at the PDF specification seems to suggest that you can have different encoding inside a PDF-file. Have a look at page 86. So a PDF library with some kind of low level access should be able to provide you with encoding used for a string. But if you just want the text and don't care about the internal encodings used I would suggest to let the library take care of conversions for you.
PDF uses "named" characters, in the sense that a character is a name and not a numeric code. Character "a" has name "a", character "2" has name "two" and the euro sign has name "euro", to give a few examples. PDF defines a few "standard" "base" encodings (named "WinAnsiEncoding", "MacRomanEncoding" and a few more, can't remember exactly), an encoding being a one-to-one correspondence between character names and byte values (yes, only 0 to 255). The exact, normative values for these predefined encodings are in the PDF specification. All these encodings use the ASCII values for the US-ASCII characters, but they differ in higher byte values.
A PDF file may define new encodings by taking a "base" encoding (say, WinAnsiEncoding) and redefining a few bytes, so a PDF author may, for example, define a new encoding named "MySuperbEncoding" as WinAnsiEncoding but with byte value 65 changed to mean character "ntilde" (this definition goes inside the PDF file), and then specifying that some strings in the file use encoding "MySuperbEncoding". In this case, a string containing byte values 65-66-67 would mean characters "ñBC" and not "ABC". And note that I mean characters, nothing to do with glyphs or fonts. Different strings withing the PDF file may use different encodings (this provides a way for using more tan 256 characters in the PDF file, even though every string is defined as a byte sequence, and one byte always corresponds to one character).
So, the answer to your question is: characters within a PDF file can well be encoded internally in an ad-hoc encoding made on the spot for that specific PDF file. PDF parsers should make the appropriate substitutions when necessary. I do not know PDFMiner but I'm surprised that it (being a PDF parser) gives incorrect values, as the specification is very clear on how this must be interpreted. It IS possible to get all the necessary information from the PDF file, but, as Mattias said, it might be a large project and I think a program named PDFMiner should do exactly this kind of job.