Check Mark Symbols

Seven characters in two families

Four of them are bare marks. U+2713 CHECK MARK and U+2714 HEAVY CHECK MARK are the same tick at two stroke
weights, one codepoint apart. U+2717 BALLOT X and U+2718 HEAVY BALLOT X are the matching pair for the opposite
answer. The naming is consistent across these four: HEAVY marks the thicker drawing of the
character beside it, not a different shape.

The other three are boxes with the mark already inside. U+2610 BALLOT BOX is an empty box,
U+2611 BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK has the tick and U+2612 BALLOT BOX WITH X has the X. Each is a single character, not a box
character with a mark laid over it, so you cannot separate them and you do not have to worry about
the two halves drifting apart. A three-state list — unanswered, yes, no — is these three
characters and nothing else.

All seven are Neutral width

Every character here carries East Asian Width Neutral, the narrow class. That is the reason
to build a checklist from this set rather than from the wider marks: the rows keep the same cell
count, so a monospace list stays aligned. Mixing in a Wide character breaks it — U+274C CROSS MARK and
U+274E NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK, the two Wide cross marks, will push the rest of the row along by a cell.

How to tell whether you have the character

U+2713 CHECK MARK is a tick as a matter of identity. The font decides how it is drawn and nothing
else: in a font with a glyph for it you get a tick, in a font without one you get a fallback
drawing or an empty box, and in both cases the stored character is the same and pastes out
correctly.

That gives a test. Change the font on a tick you already have. If it turns into a letter, or if
pasting it into a plain-text field produces something that is not a tick, then what you had was
never U+2713 — the shape was coming from somewhere other than the character, and it will not
survive the trip. Paste the character from the grid above and the question does not arise.

A character is not an image

These are text, so there is no background to make transparent and no resolution to pick. A tick
here takes the colour of the text around it and scales with the font size. If what you need is a
file with an alpha channel, that is a rendering job — the character is the input to it, not a
substitute for it.

Not in this set

The heavier boxed tick U+2705 WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK is a separate character and is not here;
it is Wide, so it behaves differently in a column. The multiplication signs U+2715 MULTIPLICATION X and U+2716 HEAVY MULTIPLICATION X look
like the ballot X but are filed with the math symbols rather than
as ballot marks. For every other X-shaped and
cross-shaped character see cross symbols, and for boxes that join up
into rules and frames see line and box symbols. The general reference is
symbols to copy and paste.