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It's nice to be able to use background colors to highlight sections of text (my case is monospace, in a terminal emulator), but a sharp transition between background colors doesn't always look great. Full height half rounded shapes, flush right (for the left hand side) and flush left (for the right side) could be used to create the look of a rounded rectangle highlighting the text, but I cannot find characters that work. The black half circles ◖ and ◗ (U+25D6 and U+25D7) are not designed to be full height, let alone flush and the left half circle 🤇 (U+1F907) is tantalizing but it isn't filled in and doesn't seem to have a right half. I'm really after the rounded siblings of the half blocks (U+2590 and U+258C). Using parentheses just doesn't create the effect.

Are there any Unicode characters that might look good, short of proposing to supplement the existing block elements?

(update follows)

Investigating further I found U+1FB6E and U+1FB6C which are flush right and left triangles from the Symbols for Legacy Computing block, but don't look that great for my purposes - 🭮██████████🭬 - they should work for arrowheads with box drawing (an unrelated concern).

I am using a couple of box drawing characters at each end for a little flourish - ╠╪██████████████████╪╣ - but they're not ideal.

(additional note)

If your browser/OS doesn’t have robust Unicode fonts/support, some characters above may not display correctly. Consider installing JuliaMono (https://juliamono.netlify.app/) and GNU FreeFonts (https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/) if possible.

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I don't belive one exists*, its hard to be sure though. Its also most likely very fragile since its dependent on the font(s) installed. But YMMV, so for a internal project where you can define the system it might be fine.

You can search the unicode characters at unicode-table.com

* it would be nice. Maybe it should be suggested? But then is it really unicodes job to make all the possible drawing symbols?

There are fonts that use ligatures for this kind of stuff though. Which could be a nice way to fallback to another character when copy pasting out of your system.

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  • Scouring Unicode resources is an ongoing, perhaps lifelong, activity. Given the existing (and ongoing upgrades to) support for character based graphics, further enhancements, like this, seem in scope. When I compare it to the alternative of diversifying the range of poop emoji, I feel my case is strong! 🙃
    – user57939
    Aug 19, 2022 at 6:50
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    @DanielMGessel im perfectly sure scatologists would prefer atleast sevaral more colors and shapes of poop emoticons. while your at it ask for a full height quarter circle for rounding blocks of text.
    – joojaa
    Aug 19, 2022 at 14:39
  • That particular character is a reminder that I too often text being tired to my wife. It's a wonder I don't tell her "I'm 💩-ed" more often!
    – user57939
    Aug 19, 2022 at 16:52
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The JuliaMono font provides precisely these full block, half circles in the private use area, at U+E0B6 and U+E0B4 (for left and right, respectively). Using JuliaMono as my primary font or, as long as it doesn't conflict with other usage of this area, as a fallback font solves the problem for my customized statuslines in Bash and Emacs. These symbols appear to be designed with the Powerline plugin in mind (which is principally for the vim editor): it is not coincidental that they serve my purposes!

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