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I am wondering which is the symbol used to denote line breaks in Microsoft Word. It can be visualized with the following steps:

  1. In MS Word, open empty document.
  2. Press SHIFT + ENTER to insert a line break.
  3. Press CTRL + SHIFT + 8 to show the formatting symbols in the editor.

Here is a picture of the symbol:enter image description here
The closest I can find in the Unicode tables is the Carriage return symbol (↵), but it doesn't look the same in any of the fonts installed on my machine.

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  • I think what you are asking is "Word uses a certain glyph that doesn't appear to be installed on my machine. How does it do it?" But if that is the question, this is probably the wrong site for it.
    – Andrew Leach
    Oct 23, 2013 at 17:35
  • The context is that we are creating similar product and wanted to use the same formatting symbols as MS Word. For example, paragraphs are denoted by Pilcrow symbol.
    – Borislav Ivanov
    Oct 24, 2013 at 8:32

4 Answers 4

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This is a guess, but I'd say it's not part of any font (or at least, any font you'd want to use).

Here is a super-zoomed-in view:

zoomed-in carriage return

It's either some kind of bitmap font, or an image sprite. Modern fonts (post-Windows 95 anyways) don't typically look like that anymore.

Here's another thing to consider:

carriage return, tab, and pilcrows

I jacked the font size up and played with changing the font. The pilcrows change size and face as you adjust the type but the tab and carriage returns do not.

So, again, I'd guess it's some kind of system-level sprite sort of thing. But I am not by any means a Windows expert.

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    I think you are right - it seems that some of the formatting symbols are visualized as images and are not "real" Unicode symbols.
    – Borislav Ivanov
    Oct 24, 2013 at 8:39
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A very similar symbol appears in the 'character viewer' of my Mac. When I ask for 'copy character info', this is what I get:

DOWNWARDS ARROW WITH CORNER LEFTWARDS Unicode: U+21B5, UTF-8: E2 86 B5

Among the fonts listed under 'font variation' (the fonts where it could find the character) are Arial Unicode, Cambria and Lucida Grande. Appearently, it's not too exotic a symbol.

It's also listed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_%28symbol%29

And maybe you can even see it here:

↲

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  • It was exotic enough for Microsoft Word to not assume it was available in any standard font, so that's why they were drawn as simple bitmaps.
    – Jongware
    Mar 16, 2015 at 9:20
  • Indeed. I should have refered more explicitly to the 'use case' the OP states in the second comment.
    – Ideogram
    Mar 16, 2015 at 9:27
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The ascii decimal code is 8629. In ms word type the number while holding down the alt key. In vba replace ChrW(8629).

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  • As stated in the question itself, Carriage return symbol (↵) is similar but it's probably not the same.
    – Borislav Ivanov
    Jun 17, 2023 at 8:38
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The symbol that I believe you are looking for is the MANUAL LINE BREAK ( ^l ). Even though it looks like the ENTER sign ( ↲ ) but if you wish to search it or replace it you need to replace ^l

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