Buffalo Records Symbols

Line and Box Drawing Symbols

The whole box drawing block, 128 characters from U+2500 to U+257F. They join into a frame only in a fixed-width font, so copy them into code, a terminal or a preformatted block.

Tap any tile to copy it. Nothing is sent anywhere — the copy happens in your browser.

Monospace is a requirement, not a preference

Each character reaches the edge of the cell it occupies, so the arm leaving one glyph meets the arm entering the next. That only holds when every cell is the same width. In a proportional font the pieces land at different offsets and the frame comes apart. In practice it belongs inside <code> or <pre>, in a terminal, or in a field you know to be fixed-width, and nowhere else.

The second requirement is that lines keep their length: anything that rewraps text destroys a drawing, because a frame is only a frame while its rows stay aligned.

Read the name and you have the character

Every name in the block starts BOX DRAWINGS and then lists which arms leave the centre and at what weight. LIGHT HORIZONTAL is a thin line straight across. LIGHT DOWN AND RIGHT is a thin arm going down and another going right: the top-left corner of a box. DOWN LIGHT AND RIGHT HEAVY is that same corner with the rightward arm thickened. VERTICAL means up and down together, HORIZONTAL means left and right. Once you can read the pattern you can name the piece you want instead of hunting for it.

Three weights, and one pair that never meets

The block is organised around LIGHT, HEAVY and DOUBLE. Light and heavy mix freely: for every junction there is a character with some arms light and some heavy. Light and double mix too, but in those names light is called SINGLE, so DOWN SINGLE AND RIGHT DOUBLE is a light arm meeting a double one.

Heavy and double never mix: no name among the 128 pairs them, so a heavy line cannot join a double line. Choose between the two before you start rather than halfway along a row.

The dashed variants come in the same weights: double, triple and quadruple dash, each in light and heavy, horizontal and vertical.

The width trap

One hundred and twelve of the 128 have East Asian width Ambiguous. The sixteen exceptions are Narrow: the four double-dash characters at U+254C to U+254F, and the twelve stubs and weight transitions from U+2574 to U+257F. In a terminal that treats ambiguous-width characters as double-width, the 112 take two columns and those sixteen take one, so a drawing exact in one terminal is shredded in another, and the cause is a setting rather than a font. When a frame breaks for one reader and not another, check that first. All 128 are three bytes in UTF-8 and category So, so what damages a saved drawing is almost never the encoding.

Rounded corners, diagonals and stubs

Four characters draw a corner rounded rather than square, U+256D to U+2570, each named LIGHT ARC and the arms it joins. They exist in light weight only, so a rounded box cannot be heavy or double.

U+2571 to U+2573 are diagonals: they cross the cell corner to corner instead of meeting the other pieces, so they hatch and strike through rather than frame.

The last twelve, U+2574 to U+257F, are half-lines. U+2574, BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT LEFT, reaches left from the centre of the cell and stops; the stubs cover all four directions, light and heavy. U+257C to U+257F put one weight on each half of an axis, which is how a line changes weight mid-run instead of at a junction.

Nearby

Solid blocks and geometric fills are on shape symbols, and the heads that go on the end of a line on arrow symbols. The whole general reference is on symbols to copy and paste.