Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. These characters are characterized by being designed to be connected horizontally and/or vertically with adjacent characters, which requires proper alignment. Box-drawing characters therefore typically only work well with monospaced fonts.

In graphical user interfaces, these characters are much less useful as it is more simple and appropriate to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs. However, they are still useful for command-line interfaces and plaintext comments within source code.

Some recent embedded systems also use proprietary character sets, usually extensions to ISO 8859 character sets, which include box-drawing characters or other special symbols.

Other types of box-drawing characters are block elements, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters; these can be used for filling regions of the screen and portraying drop shadows.

Unicode

Box Drawing

Unicode includes 128 such characters in the Box Drawing block.^[1] In many Unicode fonts, only the subset that is also available in the IBM PC character set (see below) will exist, due to it being defined as part of the WGL4 character set.

The image below is provided as a quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly:

Block Elements

The Block Elements Unicode block includes shading characters. 32 characters are included in the block.

Symbols for Legacy Computing

In version 13.0, Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing, which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1980s). Few fonts support these characters, but the table of symbols is provided here: