What means
It is a partial fill used as a drawing piece.
An octant is one of eight small regions inside a character cell; the digits 3, 5, 7, and 8 identify the filled regions. A terminal is a text screen arranged in fixed-width cells. In terminal graphics, patterns like this let a row of characters sketch a blocky image.
Octants extend older block graphics
Text-only computers drew simple pictures by filling parts of fixed-width character cells, a workaround when they could not address individual pixels. Unicode encoded established block and box graphics in 1991 for compatibility with existing computer character sets, then expanded the collection in 1999 and 2002.
A 2021 proposal describes octants as eight-part block mosaics. It proposed further legacy-computing characters both to preserve graphics from less-common computers and to help present-day text-mode apps make pseudo-graphics. This tile belongs to that computer-display tradition.
Part of the collection
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does this show as a blank square?
Your font may be missing the glyph. The Unicode 16 chart says actual font shapes can vary; in April 2024, Microsoft said Cascadia Code 2404.03 added all octants.
More like this
8
How to type or find
- Search it as
- terminal graphics · text graphics · block mosaic · octant tile · terminal art · character-cell graphics
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜶿\1CDBFCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.