What means
It is a small mosaic piece used to draw a picture.
An octant divides a character cell into two columns and four rows. This pattern fills five of the eight areas, so an image program can use it as one patch alongside other text graphics tiles.
Why did early computers use octant graphics?
It let text screens draw low-resolution pictures.
Kaypro graphics on the Kaypro 10 used character cells as a low-resolution drawing grid. This personal computer's 1983 user guide describes each cell as eight on/off pixels in a 24 grid; the exact pattern appears in its standard character set.
Octants extend older block mosaics: a quadrant splits a cell into four regions and a sextant into six. Each kind turns ordinary text characters into neighboring patches; octant graphics carry that same picture-building method into a finer grid for terminal graphics.
Part of the collection
Questions people ask
1Why does it show as a blank square?
Terminal font coverage still varies as of 2026. If your selected font lacks the octant glyph, the terminal may show a missing-character box; use a font that includes octant characters.
More like this
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How to type or find
- Search it as
- terminal graphics · text graphics · octant · 2x4 pixels · semigraphics · kaypro · unicode hex input
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜶨\1CDA8Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.