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Is there a text caret Unicode glyph? I can’t imagine that such a typical character would not be present (especially considering some of the many much less useful code-points).

I have tried searching with every term for it that I can think of (below) but come up empty. The closest I could find was the APL Functional Symbol I-Beam which is close but not quite right (and isn’t even present in many fonts). It should look sort of like a bone:

Screenshot of typical text-select cursor Screenshot of large, hollow text-select cursor

Does anybody know if there is such a character in Unicode?

Searches performed:

robinCTS
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Synetech
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    ^ is ASCII char 94, which is mapped at the beginning of unicode. So unicode 00 09 (where you can leave out the 00). – Hennes Feb 09 '13 at 15:31
  • Ꮖ was the best I could find on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicode_characters :D – Oliver Salzburg Feb 09 '13 at 15:48
  • Try searching in http://codepoints.net/ and http://www.fileformat.info/. – terdon Feb 09 '13 at 16:20
  • @Hennes, the name of the standard is officially Unicode, and I believe you mean codepoint U+0094. Also check out http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html – vonbrand Feb 09 '13 at 23:04
  • @Hennes, that is (obviously) the wrong caret. (Can you not see the picture I added of what it should look like, or at least the text description… or the APL glyph that is close?) – Synetech Feb 10 '13 at 03:47
  • @terdon, I already checked fileformat, but thanks for the tip on codepoints.net. I didn’t find an actual caret, but there are a few that look similar-ish. Unfortunately they are all about the same height as other letters (1em), which won’t work because the actual caret would need to go from the ascent to the descender line. – Synetech Feb 10 '13 at 04:00
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    Hmm, someone down-voted but did not bother to explain what their problem is. If you can’t see a use for having a caret character, then just leave; don’t down-vote just because you don’t need it. – Synetech Feb 10 '13 at 04:01
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    I'm the author of codepoints.net. That's indeed an interesting question. The closest I could find semantically, is this: http://codepoints.net/U+2380 "INSERTION SYMBOL". Then you would need a font, that has a glyph at that position looking like the text caret. If that doesn't help, I suggest, you ask over at http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist-unicode.html – Boldewyn Feb 11 '13 at 16:00
  • @Boldewyn, thanks for the tip; I was actually wondering about suggesting it (though in my experience, suggestions tend to go ignored; I don’t know if the Unicode consortium is more amenable to outside input). Apparently the proposal process is fairly involved, so I guess I have a (yet another) new project. ☺ I would certainly expect them to accept a useful glyph like this, especially if they have accepted such “necessary” characters like this and this. ◔_◔ – Synetech Feb 11 '13 at 16:45
  • @Synetech I'd first ask politely, if such a character was ever considered :-) If yes, there might be a reason to not put it in Unicode. Don't get the impression, that Unicode is a monolithic entity, by the way. There are lots of discussions what should and should not go into the standard, and especially the emojis, that you cite, were heavily criticized by some. (Personally, I find them great in the context of web design with icon fonts, but that's just a single use case.) – Boldewyn Feb 11 '13 at 17:48
  • @Boldewyn, actually, part of the proposal process is to check if it has previously been proposed by checking the list. This one does not seem to be listed (I tried searching the list with every variant of its name that I could think of). – Synetech Feb 11 '13 at 17:52
  • ^ is ASCII char 94, which is mapped at the beginning of unicode. That’s obviously not what I am asking about. Did you not see the pictures? – Synetech Nov 29 '13 at 19:29
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    @down-voter, what’s the problem? You don’t think you would have a use for such a character? Or do you know of one and think it is too easy to find it? Either way, your down-vote is absurd because this is at least as useful as most of the Unicode characters (and infinitely more so in many cases), and it is most certainly not easy to find. (Maybe you just did a very poor job of reading the question and misunderstood it.) – Synetech Nov 29 '13 at 19:30
  • I just noticed that the Roman numeral I lookes a lot like a typical insertion point: Ⅰ I’ll be using that for now. – Synetech Aug 10 '16 at 03:36
  • @OliverSalzburg. Ꮖ looks a little like what OP wants, but semantically it's nowhere near correct. It's U+13C6 ‹Ꮖ› CHEROKEE LETTER QUA. – TRiG Mar 27 '17 at 14:50

3 Answers3

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Well I think it’s safe to say that no, there is no such character. Part of the proposal process for requesting a Unicode glyph is to perform a search, which I did, but it came up empty.

In addition, every other search I made came up empty, including one with ShapeCatcher which found several decent stand-ins (below), but none that works quite right (is full-height).

I guess until they add one, we’ll have to use CSS to style and size one of these to fit the part.

ⵊꕯᏆ
Synetech
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There is a Unicode character for caret, and it's called "caret". It is U+2038: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2038/index.htm

You can find it in the General Punctuation category in some character mapping accessories (such as Gnome Character Map). It is not widely available, but it can be found in at least in 50 fonts that are listed on http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2038/fontsupport.htm. You might not be happy with the design of the character in these fonts, but that's an entirely different issue.

Jawa
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davarinofuntucson
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  • Hmm, it is similar to the regular caret ^, but aligned to the bottom. It looks like it is indeed supposed to be a caret, but is very old fashioned since that style is never used anymore. It’s also wasteful because you can make it by simply realigning the regular caret. ¬_¬ Unfortunately it won’t cut it because what’s need is an I-beam (terminology is also a problem as can be seen by the wide variety of search I had to try in the question). But +1 for pointing it out (I didn’t even notice the difference from the regular caret for a couple of seconds). – Synetech Aug 18 '13 at 12:49
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If you're simply looking for a picture, and it doesn't need to be one character, or even span one line, you could try drawing it in the style of ASCii art:

▝▚▞▘
   ▌
▗▞▚▖

Since, in rich text documents, Unicode can carry any font size, you could even potentially make the cursor/caret the same size as adjacent text ... just be sure to keep it in a mono-space font face.

This example makes use of:

U+259D  ▝   Quadrant upper right

U+259A  ▚   Quadrant upper left and lower right


U+259E  ▞   Quadrant upper right and lower left


U+2598  ▘   Quadrant upper left


U+258C  ▌   Left half block


U+2597  ▗   Quadrant lower right


U+259E  ▞   Quadrant upper right and lower left (again)


U+259A  ▚   Quadrant upper left and lower right (again)


U+2596  ▖   Quadrant lower left

For more information about block elements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

undrline - Reinstate Monica
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