In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, or as a dinkus. Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.
Michael Everson is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over one hundred books since 2006.
Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF.
Block Elements is a Unicode block containing square block symbols of various fill and shading. Used along with block elements are box-drawing characters, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters. These can be used for filling regions of the screen and portraying drop shadows. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Blocks.
Control Pictures is a Unicode block containing characters for graphically representing the C0 control codes, and other control characters. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Pictures for Control Codes.
The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set. The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set, is an international standard to map characters, discrete symbols used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other domains, to unique machine-readable data values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, and transmit—interchange—UCS-encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple interpretations depending on the character encoding in use, resulting in mojibake if the wrong one is chosen.
Specials is a short Unicode block of characters allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0:
The Basic Latin Unicode block, sometimes informally called C0 Controls and Basic Latin, is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ranges from U+0000 to U+007F, contains 128 characters and includes the C0 controls, ASCII punctuation and symbols, ASCII digits, both the uppercase and lowercase of the English alphabet and a control character.
Enclosed Alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop.
Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement is a Unicode block consisting of Latin alphabet characters and Arabic numerals enclosed in circles, ovals or boxes, used for a variety of purposes. It is encoded in the range U+1F100–U+1F1FF in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.
Cherokee is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters plus six lowercase letters. The Cherokee Supplement block, added in version 8.0, contains the rest of the lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.
Hiragana is a Unicode block containing hiragana characters for the Japanese language.
Enclosed CJK Letters and Months is a Unicode block containing circled and parenthesized Katakana, Hangul, and CJK ideographs. Also included in the block are miscellaneous glyphs that would more likely fit in CJK Compatibility or Enclosed Alphanumerics: a few unit abbreviations, circled numbers from 21 to 50, and circled multiples of 10 from 10 to 80 enclosed in black squares.
Kana Supplement is a Unicode block containing one archaic katakana character and 255 hentaigana characters. Additional hentaigana characters are encoded in the Kana Extended-A block.
Byzantine Musical Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for representing Byzantine music in ekphonetic notation.
Enclosed Ideographic Supplement is a Unicode block containing forms of characters and words from Chinese, Japanese and Korean enclosed within or stylised as squares, brackets, or circles. It contains three such characters containing one or more kana, and many containing CJK ideographs. Many of its characters were added for compatibility with the Japanese ARIB STD-B24 standard. Six symbols from Chinese folk religion were added in Unicode version 10.
Cherokee Supplement is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee Supplement block contains lowercase letters only, whereas the Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters, together with six lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.
Kana Extended-A is a Unicode block containing hentaigana and historic kana characters. Additional hentaigana characters are encoded in the Kana Supplement block.
Mac OS Ogham is a character encoding for representing Ogham text on Apple Macintosh computers. It is a superset of the Irish Standard I.S. 434:1999 character encoding for Ogham, adding some punctuation characters from Mac OS Roman. It is not an official Mac OS Codepage.
Symbols for Legacy Computing is a Unicode block containing graphic characters that were used for various home computers from the 1970s and 1980s and in Teletext broadcasting standards. It includes characters from the Amstrad CPC, MSX, Mattel Aquarius, RISC OS, MouseText, Atari ST, TRS-80 Color Computer, Oric, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, TRS-80, Minitel, Teletext, ATASCII, PETSCII, ZX80, and ZX81 character sets. Semigraphics characters are also included in the form of new block-shaped characters, line-drawing characters, and 60 "sextant" characters.
