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
A leaf ( : leaves) is any of the principal appendages of a vascular plant stem, usually borne laterally aboveground and specialized for photosynthesis. Leaves are collectively called foliage, as in "autumn foliage", while the leaves, ste ...
, of a
section
Section, Sectioning or Sectioned may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media
* Section (music), a complete, but not independent, musical idea
* Section (typography), a subdivision, especially of a chapter, in books and documents
** Section sig ...
. (The section is itself often known as a "signature", although technically this usage is incorrect.) The aim is to ensure that the binder can order the pages and sections in the correct order. Often the letters of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
have been used. The practice has been overtaken by advances in printing technology, and signature marks are rarely found in modern books.
Contemporary use of signature marks
A number of symbols traditionally used as binding signature marks were encoded in
ISO 5426-2[1996, Information and documentation -- Extension of the ]Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
coded character set for bibliographic
Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ...
information interchange -- Part 2: Latin characters used in minor European languages and obsolete typography and from there (to enable migration of data from the old standard) were transposed into
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, wh ...
.
* 0x32 was re-encoded with
* 0x34 , with
* 0x36 , with (also known as "hedera" and "ivy leaf")
* 0x37 , with
was added later. These latter two are the only
codepoint
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—but ...
s in Unicode 4.0 to bear the annotation "''binding signature mark''".
See also
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Signature Mark
Page layout
fr:Signature#Signature de la feuille