Dingbat


In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting, often employed for the creation of box frames. 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 :
✁✂✃✄✅✆✇✈✉☛☞✌✍✎✏
✐✑✒✓✔✕✖✗✘✙✚✛✜✝✞✟
✠✡✢✣✤✥✦✧★✩✪✫✬✭✮✯
✰✱✲✳✴✵✶✷✸✹✺✻✼✽✾✿
❀❁❂❃❄❅❆❇❈❉❊❋●❍■❏
☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○❐❑❒▲▼◆❖
◗❘❙❚❛❜❝❞ -------

The advent of Unicode and the universal character set it provides allowed commonly used dingbats to be given their own character codes. 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.

Dingbats Unicode block

The Dingbats block was 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. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats.

Character table

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.
The block has 40 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style or text presentation 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.

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:
U+270A270B270C270D
emoji✊✋✌️✍️
FITZ-1-2✊?✋?✌️?✍️?
FITZ-3✊?✋?✌️?✍️?
FITZ-4✊?✋?✌️?✍️?
FITZ-5✊?✋?✌️?✍️?
FITZ-6✊?✋?✌️?✍️?

Additional human emoji can be found in other Unicode blocks: Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs and Transport and Map Symbols.

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Dingbats block:

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.

Dingbat fonts