In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or as a dinkus (section divider). Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.
In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the code points normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on Unicode encoding, which has unique code points for dingbats.
