Dingbat

This article contains Unicode emoticons or emojis. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the intended characters.

Poem typeset with generous use of decorative dingbats around the edges (1880s). Dingbats are not part of the text.

In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, a glyph 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 to order sections.^{[citation needed]}

In the computer industry, a Dingbat font is a font that has symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters [many other fonts include dingbat glyphs, but in dedicated slots].

Examples[]

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

Encoding[]

Unicode provides code points (unique binary code) 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.^[3][4]

Compact table[]

Emoji[]

The Dingbats block contains 33 emoji: U+2702, U+2705, U+2708–U+270D, U+270F, U+2712, U+2714, U+2716, U+271D, U+2721, U+2728, U+2733–U+2734, U+2744, U+2747, U+274C, U+274E, U+2753–U+2755, U+2757, U+2763–U+2764, U+2795–U+2797, U+27A1, U+27B0 and U+27BF.^[5][6]

The block has 40 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for the following twenty base characters: U+2702, U+2708–U+2709, U+270C–U+270D, U+270F, U+2712, U+2714, U+2716, U+271D, U+2721, U+2733–U+2734, U+2744, U+2747, U+2753, U+2757, U+2763–U+2764 and U+27A1.^[7]

Emoji modifiers[]

The Dingbats block has four emoji that represent hands. They can be modified using U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF to provide for a range of human skin color using the Fitzpatrick scale:^[6]