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.

Unicode includes 128 such characters:

In all MS-DOS codepages box drawing characters are present, but their number is limited to 40:

or even to 22:

And on many Unix systems, usually only 11 basic characters are available:

or, on some terminals, they are not available at all, so they are replaced with such ASCII characters as '-', '|' and '+'.

Many microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s had their own proprietary character sets which also included box drawing characters. Some of these sets, such as Commodore's PETSCII, include box drawing symbols with no corresponding Unicode character.

Example box in Unicode:

┌─────────┐
│  ╔═══╗  │
│  ╚═╦═╝  │
╞═╤══╩══╤═╡
│ ├──┬──┤ │
│ └──┴──┘ │
└─────────┘

See also

• Character set
• Unicode Symbols
• Mapping of Unicode characters

Unicode | Псевдографика