What means
Its digits mark the filled parts of a 24 text tile.
Read the positions across each row: 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are filled, leaving the other three open. Joined side by side, octants create a block mosaic for semigraphics: pictures made from text cells.
A similar technique appears in a Kaypro drawing program from 1984: each text cell stood for eight separately switched pixels. A 2022 Unicode proposal included the octant set to keep older computer graphics convertible to and from Unicode and to support text-mode drawing. Unlike Braille-dot mosaics, solid octant cells can meet edge to edge when a terminal colors both foreground and background.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does it appear as a box or blank?
A box or blank means the active font or terminal renderer has no drawing for this character. The text still contains it; the font or renderer needs support for Unicode 16 block octants.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- octant · octants · semigraphics · pseudographics · block mosaic · terminal graphics · text graphics · 2x4 graphics
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜷜\1CDDCCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.