Fleuron (typography)

The Aldusblatt is an ornament shape, which is named after the Italian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. This used the heart-shaped leaf as decoration in his books. Another name for the Aldusblatt is Hedera sign after the Latin name for Ivy, with its leaf shape, it had a certain similarity. However, the Aldusblatt was increasingly stylized over time for heart shape. Typographic seen it belongs to the Fleurons, the flower-like decorative ornaments.

History

Already in early Greek inscriptions is the Aldusblatt to find. In the early Renaissance, it is used as Alineazeichen, as an introduction for a paragraph mark. Due to its frequent use in Aldus Manutius it was in the 16th century, an even more widespread as the final piece of a piece of text or an ornament of title pages. In old prints it featured next to the printer workshop, from which came this. Today, this symbol is generally used only rarely. Hans Peter Willenberg used it in his " writings recognize " to mark the start of additional comments.

Character

In Unicode the Aldusblatt is coded in three variants. One is found in the Unicode Miscellaneous Symbols block, two in the Unicode block Dingbats:

The last two characters are present, among others, in the font ZapfDingbats BT, and implements most Unicode -compatible fonts. The font family Thesis in addition offers other forms of Aldusblattes. In the LaTeX typesetting environment Aldus sheet can with the pifont package that provides most of the special characters of the font Zapf Dingbats by Hermann Zapf, be used without Unicode.