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.
PETSCII, also known as CBM ASCII, is the character set used in Commodore Business Machines' 8-bit home computers.
The ATASCII character set, from ATARI Standard Code for Information Interchange, alternatively ATARI ASCII, is a character encoding used in the Atari 8-bit home computers. ATASCII is based on ASCII, but is not fully compatible with it.
Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. These characters are characterized by being designed to be connected horizontally and/or vertically with adjacent characters, which requires proper alignment. Box-drawing characters therefore typically only work well with monospaced fonts.
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.
Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF.
Miscellaneous Technical is a Unicode block ranging from U+2300 to U+23FF. It contains various common symbols which are related to and used in the various technical, programming language, and academic professions. For example:
In computing, a Unicode symbol is a Unicode character which is not part of a script used to write a natural language, but is nonetheless available for use as part of a text.
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.
MouseText is a set of 32 graphical characters designed by Bruce Tognazzini and first implemented in the Apple IIc. They were then retrofitted to the Apple IIe forming part of the Enhanced IIe upgrade. A slightly revised version was then released with the Apple IIGS.
Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) had updated its ANSI X3.4-1986 standard to include more characters, or that the term identifies a single unambiguous encoding, neither of which is the case.
Text-based semigraphics, pseudographics, or character graphics is a primitive method used in early text mode video hardware to emulate raster graphics without having to implement the logic for such a display mode.
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.
The Atari ST character set is the character set of the Atari ST personal computer family including the Atari STE, TT and Falcon. It is based on code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC.
MSX character sets are a group of single- and double-byte character sets developed by Microsoft for MSX computers. They are based on code page 437.
The TRS-80 computer manufactured by Tandy / Radio Shack contains an 8-bit character set. It is partially derived from ASCII, and shares the code points from 32 - 95 on the standard model. Code points 96 - 127 are supported on models that have been fitted with a lower-case upgrade.
This article covers technical details of the character encoding system defined by ETS 300 706 of the ETSI, a standard for World System Teletext, and used for the Viewdata and Teletext variants of Videotex in Europe.
Sharp MZ character sets are character sets made by Sharp Corporation for Sharp MZ computers. The European and Japanese versions of the software use different character sets.
The Amstrad CPC character set is the character set used in the Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit personal computers when running BASIC. This character set existed in the built-in "lower" ROM chip. It is based on ASCII-1967, with the exception of character 0x5E which is the up arrow instead of the circumflex, as it is in ASCII-1963, a feature shared with other character sets of the time. Apart from the standard printable ASCII range (0x20-0x7e), it is completely different from the Amstrad CP/M Plus character set. The BASIC character set had symbols of particular use in games and home computing, while the CP/M Plus character reflected the International and Business flavor of the CP/M Plus environment. This character set is represented in Unicode as of the March 2020 release of Unicode 13.0, which added symbols for legacy computing. The three missing characters have however been accepted for inclusion in Unicode 16.0 in the symbols for legacy computing supplement.
Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement is a Unicode block containing additional graphic characters that were used for various home computers from the 1970s and 1980s. It includes characters from Amstrad CPC, Apple 8-bit, Kaypro CP/M, Ohio Scientific, Robotron KC, Sharp MZ computers, HP terminals, and TRS-80. It includes a set of semigraphics in the form of 230 "octant" characters, large images split into four "characters", and the "large type" characters used for building large text characters.
