In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

used in

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...

, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or as a dinkus (section divider). Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections. In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the

code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...

s normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

encoding, which has unique code points for dingbat glyphs.

Examples

Examples of characters included in

( ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100 and others):

Dingbats Unicode block

provides

s for many commonly used dingbats, as listed below. Prior to widespread adoption of Unicode in the early 2010s, "dingbat fonts" were created that allocated dingbat glyphs to codepoints in code positions otherwise allocated to "normal" character sets. The Dingbats block (U+2700–U+27BF) (under the original block name "Zapf Dingbats", so named for type designer Hermann Zapf) was added to the

Standard in October 1991, with the release of version 1.0. This code block contains decorative character variants, and other marks of emphasis and non-textual symbolism. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats. The block name was changed from "Zapf Dingbats" to "Dingbats" in June 1993, with the release of 1.1.

Ornamental Dingbats Unicode block

The Ornamental Dingbats block () was added to the

Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. This code block contains ornamental leaves, punctuation, and ampersands, quilt squares, and checkerboard patterns. It is a subset of dingbat fonts Webdings, Wingdings, and Wingdings 2.

Character table

Dingbat fonts

* Webdings, a TrueType dingbat font designed at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and published in 1997 * Wingdings, a TrueType dingbat font assembled by Microsoft in 1990, using glyphs from Lucida Arrows, Lucida Icons, and Lucida Stars, three fonts they licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes * Zapf Dingbats, a dingbat font designed by Hermann Zapf in 1978, and licensed by International Typeface Corporation

References

External links

Retinart: A history of often-seen typographic marks

Dingbat Depot: a large, well-known archive of free dingbat fonts.
{{Typography terms Typography Emoji