Variation Selector-77

It has no meaning alone; it requests a registered glyph variant.

The earliest evidence for this exact form is its inclusion in Unicode's Variation Selectors Supplement, introduced in Unicode 4.0. Its documented purpose was practical: let plain text carry a glyph choice that font selection alone could not carry.

In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) text, a base character followed by a registered supplementary selector can preserve a particular glyph for a person or place name, a government record, or a publication. The selector narrows the drawing; it does not supply pronunciation, emotion, or a new word.

Why does it disappear or change nothing?

That is normal when the pair is unsupported or unregistered.

A glyph is the drawn form of a character, and VS77 has no visible glyph of its own. If the pair is not registered, or the font or application lacks variation-sequence support, the base displays as usual and the selector contributes no visible mark.

A string can therefore contain VS77 while looking unchanged. Unsupported software may ignore selectors during search, sorting, or parsing; a CJK input method may offer a supported variant as a separate choice or in a menu attached to the base.

How do I use VS77?

Use it only as part of a documented base-plus-selector pair.

Place it immediately after the base character, or copy it from the palette when a specification or input method calls for it. A Unicode-aware editor can insert U+E013C, but the selector alone should normally remain invisible.