Dingbat

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, specifically, 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 or used in bookbinding to order sections.[citation needed]

In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font[1] is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the code points normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on Unicode encoding, which has unique code points for dingbat glyphs.

  1. ^ "A Word About Symbol or "Pi" Fonts" (PDF). Adobe Inc. Retrieved 27 September 2024.