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Box Drawing Characters

Unicode characters (U+2500–U+257F) designed to draw boxes and tables in text-based interfaces and terminal emulators.

Typography

Bullet Character

A typographic symbol (•, U+2022) used for list items and decorative purposes in text.

Typography

Curly Quotes (Smart Quotes)

Typographically correct quotation marks (“ ” ‘ ’) as opposed to straight/typewriter quotes (" ').

Typography

Diacritical Mark

A mark added to a letter to change its pronunciation or meaning (e.g., acute accent é, umlaut ü, tilde ñ).

Typography

Ellipsis

A single character (…, U+2026) representing three dots, preferred over typing three periods.

Typography

Em Dash

A typographic dash (—, U+2014) the width of a letter M, used for parenthetical statements and breaks in thought.

Typography

En Dash

A typographic dash (–, U+2013) the width of a letter N, used for ranges (e.g., 1–10) and relationships.

Typography

Font Fallback

A mechanism where the browser uses alternative fonts when the primary font lacks a glyph for a character.

Typography

Fullwidth & Halfwidth

Character variants occupying different widths in CJK typography. Fullwidth characters occupy the same space as CJK ideographs.

Typography

Glyph

The visual representation of a character as rendered by a specific font. One character can have multiple glyphs across different fonts.

Typography

Kerning

The adjustment of spacing between specific character pairs for improved visual appearance (e.g., AV, To).

Typography

Letter Spacing (Tracking)

Uniform adjustment of space between all characters in a block of text, distinct from kerning.

Typography

Ligature

A single glyph combining two or more characters (e.g., fi, fl). Can be typographic (font feature) or Unicode characters.

Typography

Non-Breaking Space

A space character (U+00A0) that prevents automatic line breaking at its position, keeping adjacent words together.

Typography

Soft Hyphen

An invisible character (U+00AD) that marks where a word may be hyphenated at a line break. Invisible otherwise.

Typography

Tofu (Missing Glyph)

The empty rectangle (□) displayed when a font cannot render a character, named for its tofu-like appearance.

Typography

Whitespace Characters

Characters that represent horizontal or vertical space (space, tab, newline, etc.) but have no visible glyph.

Typography

Zero-Width Space

An invisible Unicode character (U+200B) that indicates a possible line break point without displaying any visible space.

Typography