What means
It carried tiny pictures inside text pages. British teletext sent information pages through analog TV; its graphics characters divided fixed character boxes into six cells. The system emerged in the early 1970s; a 1976 specification documents joined and separated modes. “Sextant” means a six-part mosaic.
Adjacent tiles form larger drawings. Unicode’s 2021 proposal sought distinct characters so emulators and existing teletext software could preserve the gapped mode.
Why do its cells have gaps?
It preserves teletext’s separated graphics mode. That mode left background-color boundaries around and between its six cells; the contiguous mode filled the whole character box. The gutters are intentional.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does show as a box on some devices?
It is recent: Unicode added it in version 16.0 (2024), and phones and computers whose fonts are older than that have nothing to draw it with. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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How to type or find
- Search it as
- teletext · mosaic · graphics · terminal · pixel · videotex
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜹳\1CE73Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.