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.
The general prohibition sign, also known informally as the no symbol, 'do not' sign, circle-backslash symbol, nay, interdictory circle, prohibited symbol, don't do it symbol, or universal no, is a red circle with a 45-degree diagonal line inside the circle from upper-left to lower-right. It is typically overlaid on a pictogram to warn that an activity is not permitted, or has accompanying text to describe what is prohibited.
An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.
Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Certain versions of the font's copyright string include attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint the font.
Miscellaneous Symbols is a Unicode block (U+2600–U+26FF) containing glyphs representing concepts from a variety of categories: astrological, astronomical, chess, dice, musical notation, political symbols, recycling, religious symbols, trigrams, warning signs, and weather, among others.
Webdings is a TrueType dingbat typeface developed in 1997. It was initially distributed with Internet Explorer 4.0, then as part of Core fonts for the Web, and is included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. All of the pictographic Webding glyphs that were not unifiable with existing Unicode characters were added to the Unicode Standard when version 7.0 was released in June 2014.
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.
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.
A fleuron, also known as printers' flower, is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves; the term derives from the Old French: floron ("flower"). Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats". A commonly encountered fleuron is the ❦, the floral heart or hedera. It is also known as an aldus leaf.
In books and documents, a section is a subdivision, especially of a chapter.
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.
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.
Dingbats is a Unicode block containing dingbats. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats; it was the Unicode block to have imported characters from a specific typeface; Unicode later adopted a policy that excluded symbols with "no demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text", and thus no further dingbat typefaces were encoded until Webdings and Wingdings were encoded in Version 7.0. Some ornaments are also an emoji, having optional presentation variants.
Box Drawing is a Unicode block containing characters for compatibility with legacy graphics standards that contained characters for making bordered charts and tables, i.e. box-drawing characters. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Form and Chart Components.
Emoticons is a Unicode block containing emoticons or emoji. Most of them are intended as representations of faces, although some of them include hand gestures or non-human characters.
Transport and Map Symbols is a Unicode block containing transportation and map icons, largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' emoji implementations of Shift JIS, and to encode characters in the Wingdings and Wingdings 2 character sets.
Geometric Shapes Extended is a Unicode block containing Webdings/Wingdings symbols, mostly different weights of squares, crosses, and saltires, and different weights of variously spoked asterisks, stars, and various color squares and circles for emoji.
Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block. It also includes Typikon symbols.
Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block.
