A fleuron (), also known as printers' flower, is a

typographic Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacin ...

element, or

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 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 ('flower').

Robert Bringhurst Robert Bringhurst Appointments to the Order of Canada (2013). (born 1946) is a CanadianWong (1999). poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote ''The El ...

in ''

The Elements of Typographic Style ''The Elements of Typographic Style'' is a book on typography and style by Canadian typographer, poet and translator Robert Bringhurst. Originally published in 1992 by Hartley & Marks Publishers, it was revised in 1996, 2001 (v2.4), 2002 (v2. ...

'' calls the forms "

horticultural Horticulture (from ) is the art and science of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs and ornamental plants. Horticulture is commonly associated with the more professional and technical aspects of plant cultivation on a smaller and mo ...

dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or a ...

s". A commonly encountered fleuron is the , the ''floral heart'' or ' (ivy leaf), also known as an ''aldus leaf'' after Italian Renaissance printer

Aldus Manutius Aldus Pius Manutius (; ; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and Renaissance humanism, humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preser ...

History

Flower decorations are among the oldest typographic ornaments. A fleuron can also be used to fill the white space that results from the

indentation __FORCETOC__ In the written form of many languages, indentation describes empty space ( white space) used before or around text to signify an important aspect of the text such as: * Beginning of a paragraph * Hierarchy subordinate concept * Qu ...

of the first line of a paragraph, on a line by itself to divide paragraphs in a highly stylized way, to divide lists, or for pure ornamentation. The fleuron (as a formal

) is a sixteenth century introduction. cited in Fleurons were crafted the same way as other typographic elements were: as individual metal sorts that could be fit into the printer's compositions alongside letters and numbers. This saved the printer time and effort in producing ornamentation. Because the sorts could be produced in multiples, printers could build up borders with repeating patterns of fleurons.

Fleurons in Unicode

Thirty forms of fleuron have

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 in

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 ...

. The Dingbats and

Miscellaneous Symbols 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, trig ...

blocks have three fleurons that the standard calls "floral hearts" (also called "aldus leaf", "ivy leaf", "hedera" and "vine leaf"); twenty-four fleurons (from the pre-Unicode

Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat typeface, fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida (font), Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bige ...

and Wingdings 2 fonts) in the Ornamental Dingbats block and three more fleurons used in archaic languages are also supported. * (Miscellaneous Symbols) * (Dingbats) * (Dingbats) * * * * (Ornamental Dingbats) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Unicode also considers the following seven glyphs as fleurons: * (Dingbats) * (Dingbats) * (Dingbats) ** (Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs) ** (Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs) * (Dingbats) ** (Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs)

Gallery

References

External links

Book cover printed using fleuron designs
{{navbox punctuation Typographical symbols Flowers in culture

History

Fleurons in Unicode

Gallery

See also

References

External links