Arabic star

The Arabic star is a punctuation mark developed to be distinct from the asterisk (*). The asterisk had existed in feudal times, and the original shape of the asterisk was six-pointed, each point like a teardrop coming from the center. However, some typewriters had difficulty printing the six arms distinctly.

For stars with Arabic names, see List of Arabic star names.
٭
Arabic star
In UnicodeU+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR

The Arabic star is given a distinct character in Unicode, U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR (HTML ٭ · noted: "Appearance rather variable"), in the range Arabic punctuation.[1]

Variants

In many modern fonts, however, the asterisk is five-pointed, and the Arabic star is sometimes six- or eight-pointed. The two symbols are compared below (the display depends on your browser's font).

AsteriskFull-width AsteriskArabic starfive-pointed starsix-pointed stareight-pointed star
* ＊ ٭ ★ ✶ ✴

Unicode

In Unicode, Arabic and similar stars are encoded at:

  • U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR (HTML ٭)
  • U+06DE ۞ ARABIC START OF RUB EL HIZB (HTML ۞)

In some displays, the use of the ٭ character can cause the text directionality to change.[2]

See also

References
  1. Chart U+0600 Arabic
  2. Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.