The Shorthand Format Controls block spans U+1BCA0–U+1BCAF, 16 codepoints in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane). 4 are assigned in Unicode 16.0; the other 12 are reserved for future characters.
All of its characters have the script value Common: they are shared across writing systems rather than tied to one.
By general category: 4 format characters (Cf).
The first 4 arrived in Unicode 7.0 (2014).
Because it lies outside the BMP, every character here takes four bytes in UTF-8 and a surrogate pair in UTF-16.