On 10/2/2025 7:24 AM, Jon Bondy via Discuss wrote:
I need to find two special characters (a headlight symbol and an
arrow) to emboss into a print I am making. I know these kinds of
symbols are available as emojis and as icons, but I am not sure
whether they are available as characters. I would need to know the
font and character codes. Even better, how would I search for this as
a general case?
Use one of the Unicode/emoji lookup sites. The one that happened to
come up first when I searched for "headlight unicode" was compart.com.
I didn't find any headlights per se. This has some that are sort of
headlight-ish: https://emojidb.org/headlight-emojis
There are a zillion arrows:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=arrow#characters
Scroll down a page or so to get past the ones that are modifiers for
other characters.
Once you find a Unicode code that you like, you can use it in OpenSCAD
using the \u or \U string escapes. \u is for four-digit codes; \U is
for six-digit codes. Thus, for instance, U+21AF DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW
is "\u21af".
And then you have to find a font that includes that glyph. For that
particular one, Liberation Sans doesn't seem to.
Use Windows/Font Lists (not Help / Font List). Type the character you
need into the "Chars" field to filter for fonts that include it.
For that particular character, for my installation, there are nine.
On 10/2/2025 7:24 AM, Jon Bondy via Discuss wrote:
> I need to find two special characters (a headlight symbol and an
> arrow) to emboss into a print I am making. I know these kinds of
> symbols are available as emojis and as icons, but I am not sure
> whether they are available as characters. I would need to know the
> font and character codes. Even better, how would I search for this as
> a general case?
Use one of the Unicode/emoji lookup sites. The one that happened to
come up first when I searched for "headlight unicode" was compart.com.
I didn't find any headlights per se. This has some that are sort of
headlight-ish: https://emojidb.org/headlight-emojis
There are a zillion arrows:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=arrow#characters
Scroll down a page or so to get past the ones that are modifiers for
other characters.
Once you find a Unicode code that you like, you can use it in OpenSCAD
using the \u or \U string escapes. \u is for four-digit codes; \U is
for six-digit codes. Thus, for instance, U+21AF DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW
is "\u21af".
And then you have to find a font that includes that glyph. For that
particular one, Liberation Sans doesn't seem to.
Use Windows/Font Lists (not Help / Font List). Type the character you
need into the "Chars" field to filter for fonts that include it.
For that particular character, for my installation, there are nine.
