Contemporary Use of Signature Marks
A number of symbols used as binding signature marks were encoded in ISO 5426-2 and from there (to enable migration of data from the old standard) found their way into Unicode.
- 0x32 REFERENCE MARK was unified with U+203B (※)
- 0x34 MALTESE CROSS, with U+2720 (✠)
- 0x36 RIGHTWARDS LEAF ARROW, with U+2767 (❧) ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET (also known as "hedera" and "ivy leaf")
- 0x37 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SIDEWAYS Q had to be added into Unicode as U+213A (℺), ROTATED CAPITAL Q
U+2619 (☙), REVERSED ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET, was added later. These latter two are the only codepoints in Unicode 4.0 to bear the annotation "binding signature mark". It is unlikely that Unicode will encode any more marks since they constitute metatextual and not textual information even though other symbols were used as binding signature marks with printers making something of a house style of the particular blocks of type they chose.
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Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, signature and/or marks:
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The childless experts on child raising also bring tears of laughter to my eyes when they say, “I love children because they’re so honest.” There is not an agent in the CIA or the KGB who knows how to conceal the theft of food, how to fake being asleep, or how to forge a parent’s signature like a child.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)
“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there.... These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)