Flag Emoji, Symbols and Signs

Text Art/ ASCII art

TextART, ASCII Art, ANSI art or Word art refers to images that are created using the ASCII text characters. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used in computers and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.

One of the main reasons TextARt/ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII/TExt art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.

Example of Text art/ASCII art:

  |\_/|        ****************************    (\_/)
 / @ @ \       *  "Purrrfectly pleasant"  *   (='.'=) 
( > º < )      *       Poppy Prinz        *   (")_(")
 `>>x<<´       *                          *
 /  O  \       ****************************   (^._.^)~
 

EMOJI

Emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic/text messages and web pages. Emoji are used much like emoticons and exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. Originating on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, emoji have become increasingly popular worldwide since their international inclusion in Apple's iPhone, which was followed by similar adoption by Android and other mobile operating systems.

Example of emoji: 😒 💔

Text Symbol/Unicode Characters

Text Symbol/Unicode is a character encoding standard that has widespread acceptance. Microsoft software uses Unicode at its core. Whether you realize it or not, you are using Unicode already! Basically, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one.

Unicode has been adopted by all modern software providers and now allows data to be transported through many different platforms, devices and applications without corruption. Support of Unicode forms the foundation for the representation of languages and symbols in all major operating systems, search engines, browsers, laptops, and smart phones—plus the Internet and World Wide Web (URLs, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, etc.). Supporting Unicode is the best way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.

Example of Text Symbols: ⇔ ↺ ⌂