What means
It is one tile in a small text-screen drawing. An octant is a character cell split into two columns and four rows; “178” identifies filled parts 1, 7, and 8. As of 2026, Word for Windows turns 1CDAC into this character with Alt+X.
These tiles belong to semigraphics: characters used like tiny pixels when a screen worked in text cells. Kaypro computers running CP/M, an operating system, used a 24 grid to plot simple pictures; joining cells made larger mosaics. A Kaypro 10 guide from 1983 documents the method. A 2021 Unicode proposal later grouped Kaypro patterns with graphics from other computers and teletext, a service for sending text pages over television, in a shared character set.
Why can this render differently on another screen?
Its appearance depends on font and terminal support. A terminal-support tracker checked in 2026 reports octant drawing in Ghostty, Kitty, and VTE, but not xterm.js. If neither the font nor the terminal can draw it, an app may show a missing-glyph box even while the text still contains this character.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does Block Octant-178 show as a box?
It usually means the font or terminal cannot draw this character. The character can still be present in the text; use a font or terminal that supports octant tiles.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- kaypro · semigraphics · pixel · mosaic · terminal · 2×4
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜶬\1CDAC1CDAC without U+ and press Alt+X.𜶬 in HTML source; the browser resolves this hexadecimal character reference to the character.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.