Left One Eighth Block

A one-eighth fill for text graphics.

Older vendor character sets and computer terminals used block graphics to draw inside fixed display cells. Teletext and videotex—systems that sent text and simple pictures to TVs—also used mosaics of block shapes. Unicode's block family gathers marks from these different display traditions.

In a text progress bar, the wider left-filling blocks and █ let the bar show fractions of a cell. Put ▏ at the end as the final, one-eighth-filled cell instead of rounding straight to a whole character.

Why does the left one eighth block look wrong?

The font decides how the fraction is drawn.

The glyph marks part of a display cell, but Unicode does not prescribe one pixel drawing. A proportional font or missing fallback glyph can make it look too wide, too thin, off-center, or absent; a monospace font helps adjoining cells line up into a cleaner bar.