Dingbat  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character. The term continues to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that have symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.

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

The advent of Unicode and the universal character set it provides allowed commonly used dingbats to be given their own character codes, from 2700 to 27BF (hexadecimal). Although fonts claiming Unicode coverage will contain glyphs for dingbats in addition to alphabetic characters, fonts that have dingbats in place of alphabetic characters continue to be popular, primarily for ease of input. Such fonts are also sometimes known as pi fonts.

Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks, used in bookbinding to order sections.

Unicode dingbats

Dingbats were added to the Unicode Standard in June, 1993, with the release of version 1.1. This code block contains decorative character variants, and other marks of emphasis and non-textual symbolism.

The Unicode block for Dingbats is U+2700–U+27BF:

See also

• Emoji
• Fleuron (typography), known as a class of horticultural dingbats
• Punctuation
• Text semigraphics, a method for emulating raster graphics using text mode video hardware

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 in 1978, and licensed by International Typeface Corporation