Box Drawing Characters
Before graphical interfaces, borders and boxes in software were drawn with plain text characters: straight lines, corners and junctions that lined up perfectly in a monospace font. Unicode’s box drawing block preserves the full set, light and heavy weights, single and double lines, every T-junction and corner.
They are still genuinely useful today in terminal interfaces, command-line tools and ASCII art, anywhere a border needs to be drawn with characters instead of CSS.
Questions
Do box drawing characters still have a practical use?
Yes, mainly in terminal and command-line interfaces, where borders are drawn with characters rather than graphics.
Is there an Alt code for box drawing characters?
No. Copy the character directly, or use its HTML entity or Unicode value.
Why do box drawing characters only line up correctly in some fonts?
They are designed for monospace fonts, where every character occupies the same width. In a proportional font the lines will not connect cleanly.
Can box drawing characters build a table in plain text?
Yes. Combined with a monospace font, the horizontal, vertical and junction characters here can form a complete bordered table without any image or markup.
Is there a difference between single and double line box drawing sets?
Yes, they are separate characters. Single and double line pieces are not meant to be mixed in the same border, since their junctions do not line up with each other cleanly.