→ ← ↑ ↓ Is there a 'Diagonal Arrow' symbol for websites?

Are there diagonal arrow symbols that can be used in text documents/websites and the like? I found four standard here (→ ← ↑ ↓), but can’t seem to find how to make diagonals?

Do these exist?

Are you on a Mac or a PC?

yes: :arrow_upper_left::arrow_upper_right::arrow_lower_right::arrow_lower_left:

those are the unicode 0x2196 NORTH WEST ARROW - 0x2199 SOUTH WEST ARROW characters. There are more variations if you need them. Unicode Characters in the 'Symbol, Other' Category

Sweet! Thanks so much–I looked everywhere and couldn’t find any that worked :slight_smile:

The specification for HTML 4.0 does not define standard character entities for the diagonal arrows although it’s possible to show the characters using Unicode designations. Actual display of the characters, of course, depends on proper support in your application, OS, and font system.

So does that mean the arrows Superfluous Parentheses posted may not appear for everyone?

Good luck getting anything with a codepoint higher than 127 to display for everyone.

They’ll display for a lot of people, though, and more people in the future as non-compliant software is gradually replaced.

For the web, provided you copy/paste those characters in a unicode document or use hex codes like :arrow_lower_left: and you use a standard font, they will probably work for everybody with relatively recent software. The main issue is the fonts, but any OS these days has fonts that include these basic symbols. I think. They should, anyway :slight_smile:

For me, they work right here on Firefox 3 / Debian Linux, and they work for you too - otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see them :smiley:

Haha, indeed. Alright, thanks man–sounds like they’ll work perfectly :slight_smile:

My system can display such symbols as CLOUD :cloud:, UMBRELLA :open_umbrella:, and COMET :comet:, but can’t display WHEELCHAIR :wheelchair:, ANCHOR :anchor:, or SCALES :balance_scale:. The choice seems pretty random.

They all work fine for me. :cool:

None of them work for me.

Not even the diagonal arrows, or just the more esoteric characters below? What browser & OS are you using?

And not at all for me. Terminus Est’s post just has polite little question marks where (I presume) those picture-characters belong, but Superfluous Parentheses’ quote of it contains big white spaces in those spots, with the text overflowing the quote box. And when I select anything in the quote box, it produces a really weird scrolling effect in all of the text to the right of the selection.

Then again, I’m using an ancient browser (Mozilla 5.0, 2003). I really need to update this whole system, one of these times…

EDIT: I see all of the arrows just fine in the body of the page and on the window title bar, but they show up as whitespace in the tab title. It’s only the little pictures that produce the weird effects.

Oh, no, I just meant the ones posted by Terminus Est. The rest show up just fine.

Firefox 3 on WinXP Pro SP 2.

<plug class=“shameless” /> for a site of mine.

Every modern OS has fonts with Unicode support. Of course, some characters are only in newer versions of Unicode, and I’m sure there are some that have not been added at all.

If you are on a website that specifies utf-8 (Unicode encoding in 8 bits), you can use the full range. SDMB has ISO-8859-1, which is Western Europe, encoding set, so you will not be able to see all of the characters that are available. Chances are good, however, that if you manually change the encoding, you will be able to see those missing characters.

Frankly, I’m not sure why anyone uses a non-Unicode encoding any more. I believe that it is a superset of all of the other encodings by now (but I’m prepared to be proven wrong on that; it’s been a while since I was dealing with the intricacies of Unicode).

Welcome to the Straight Dope, rikki. Since Superfluous Parentheses posted that 8 years ago, and hasn’t posted here in 4, it’s unlikely they’ll see your appreciation, but if you hang around maybe you’ll find some current discussions that interest you as well.