Box drawing characters

Box drawing characters, also known as line drawing characters, or pseudographics, are widely used in text user interfaces to draw various frames and boxes. In graphical user interfaces these characters are useless, because it is much simpler to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs; besides, box drawing characters work only with fixed-width (monospaced) fonts. They are still useful, however, for plaintext comments on 'Web 2.0' websites.

Used along with box drawing characters are block elements, shade characters and terminal graphic characters; these can be used for filling regions of the screen and drop shadows.

Encodings

Unicode

Unicode includes 128 such characters: [ [http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2500.pdf Box Drawing U+2500-U+257F] , The Unicode Standard 5.0 Code Charts]

The adjacent Block Elements table contains 32 block element, shade and terminal graphics characters: [ [http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2580.pdf Block Elements U+2580-U+259F] , The Unicode Standard 5.0 Code Charts]

Unix

On many Unix systems, usually only 11 basic characters are available, via the VT100 alternate character set:

References

ee also

*Character set
*Unicode Symbols
*Mapping of Unicode characters
*ASCII art
*Text-based (computing)