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, 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, used in

bookbinding Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of ''signatures'', sheets of paper folded together into sections that are bound, along one edge, with a thick needle and strong thread. Cheaper, b ...

to order sections. In the computer industry, a Dingbat font was a computer font that has symbols and shapes that reused the code points designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Most modern fonts are based on Unicode, which has unique code points for dingbat glyphs.

Examples

Examples of characters included in Unicode ( ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100 and others):

Dingbats Unicode block

Unicode provides code points 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 Unicode 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 Unicode 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 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 Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Pa ...

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