Box-drawing characters

Box Drawing Unicode includes 128 such characters in the Box Drawing block. In many Unicode fonts, only the subset that is also available in the IBM PC character set (see below) will exist, due to it being defined as part of the WGL4 character set. The image below is provided as a quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly: Block Elements The Block Elements Unicode block includes shading characters. 32 characters are included in the block. Symbols for Legacy Computing In version 13.0, Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing, which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1980s). Few fonts support these characters (one is Noto Sans Symbols 2, which only covers partially), but the table of symbols is provided here: The image below is provided as a quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly: Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement In version 16.0 (September 2024), Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement, which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1970s and 1980s). ==Platform-specific==

Various different platforms defined their own unique set of box-drawing characters. DOS The hardware code page of the original IBM PC supplied the following box-drawing characters, in what DOS now calls code page 437. This subset of the Unicode box-drawing characters is thus included in WGL4 and is far more popular and likely to be rendered correctly: The integral halves are also box drawing as they are used alongside 0xB3: Their number is further limited to 28 on those code pages that replace the 18 characters that combine single and double lines, the left and right half blocks, as well as integral halves with other, usually alphabetic, characters (such as code page 850): Note: The non-double characters are the thin (light) characters (U+2500, U+2502), not the bold (heavy) characters (U+2501, U+2503). Some OEM DOS computers supported other character sets, for example the Hewlett-Packard HP 110 / HP Portable and HP 110 Plus / HP Portable Plus, where in a modified version of the character set box-drawing characters were added in reserved areas of their normal HP Roman-8 character set. Historical Many microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s had their own proprietary character sets, which also included box-drawing characters. Many of these were added to Unicode as Symbols for Legacy Computing. Commodore Commodore machines, such as the Commodore PET and the Commodore 64, included a set of text semigraphics with block elements and dithering patterns in the PETSCII character set. keyboard layout, illustrating PETSCII graphics characters Sinclair The Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum included a set of text semigraphics with quadrant-based block elements. The ZX80 and ZX81 also included a set of text semigraphics with dithering patterns. BBC and Acorn The BBC Micro could utilize the Teletext 7-bit character set, which had 128 box-drawing characters, whose code points were shared with the regular alphanumeric and punctuation characters. Control characters were used to switch between regular text and box drawing. The BBC Master and later Acorn computers have the soft font by default defined with line drawing characters. Amstrad The Amstrad CPC character set also has soft characters defined by default as block and line drawing characters. The CP/M Plus character set used on various Amstrad computers of the CPC, PCW and Spectrum families included a rich set of line-drawing characters as well: Apple MouseText is a set of display characters for the Apple IIc, IIe, and IIGS that includes box-drawing characters. ==Encoding==

On many platforms, the character shape is determined programmatically from the character code. • ZX Spectrum block characters: • : • Amstrad CPC block characters: • : • Amstrad CPC line characters: • : • BBC Master line characters: • : • Teletext block characters: • : However, DOS line- and box-drawing characters are not ordered in any programmatic manner, so calculating a particular character shape needs to use a look-up table. ==Examples==

Sample diagrams made out of the standard box-drawing characters, using a monospaced font: ┌─┬┐ ╔═╦╗ ╓─╥╖ ╒═╤╕ │ ││ ║ ║║ ║ ║║ │ ││ ├─┼┤ ╠═╬╣ ╟─╫╢ ╞═╪╡ └─┴┘ ╚═╩╝ ╙─╨╜ ╘═╧╛ ┌───────────────────┐ │ ╔═══╗ Some Text │▒ │ ╚═╦═╝ in the box │▒ ╞═╤══╩══╤═══════════╡▒ │ ├──┬──┤ │▒ │ └──┴──┘ │▒ └───────────────────┘▒ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ ==See also==