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

ornament An ornament is something used for decoration. Ornament may also refer to: Decoration * Ornament (art), any purely decorative element in architecture and the decorative arts * Biological ornament, a characteristic of animals that appear to serve ...

, 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 g ...

used in

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

, often employed to create box frames, (similar to

box-drawing character 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. Box-drawing characters typically only work well with monospaced fonts. ...

s) or as a

dinkus In typography, a dinkus is a typographic symbol which often consists of three spaced asterisks in a horizontal row, i.e. . The symbol has a variety of uses, and it usually denotes an intentional omission or a logical "break" of varying degree ...

(section divider). Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as

signature mark A signature mark, in traditional bookbinding, is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or leaf, of a section. (The section is itself often known as a "signature", although technicall ...

s, used in bookbinding to order sections. In the computer industry, a Dingbat font was a

computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for pri ...

that has symbols and shapes that reused the

code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—bu ...

s 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, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s. Most modern fonts are based on

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, 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") 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 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. Cert ...

Character table

Dingbat fonts

* Webdings, a TrueType dingbat font designed at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

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