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by chrismorgan 1130 days ago
The more commonly-used characters are ▲ and ▼, BLACK {UP/DOWN}-POINTING TRIANGLE (U+25B2, U+25BC).

Parent comment used much newer characters 🞁 and 🞃, BLACK {UP/DOWN}-POINTING ISOSCELES RIGHT TRIANGLE (U+1F781, U+1F783). These were added in Unicode 7, June 2014, where the others have been around for thirty years. I’m mildly surprised at lack of font support on macOS. For me they’re being rendered with Noto Sans Math, and completely wrong: they’re not being drawn as right-angled triangles at all (the angle is about 53° rather than 90°)! I’m guessing the commenter also had a bad font on them, because as a right angle it’d look all wrong for this purpose. (I’ve filed a bug report at https://github.com/notofonts/math/issues/47. Curiously, Noto Sans Symbols 2 also includes the character and gets its shape right, but Noto Sans Math is higher in the font fallback list (`fc-match sans-serif --all`: 881 lines, NotoSansMath-Regular.ttf is 52nd and NotoSansSymbols2-Regular.ttf is 89th.)

There are also ⯅ and ⯆, BLACK {UP/DOWN}-POINTING TRIANGLE CENTRED (U+2BC5, U+2BC6). And more, but of roughly-these-sized ones, these are the ones.

There are lots of triangles in Unicode.

3 comments

Interesting, only the old triangles work for me on Firefox (Android 12). They all show correctly on Firefox in Windows 10
Ah, yes, those are the right ones! I was looking at the wrong code block.

There are lots of triangles and also arrows, so commonness of font support would definitely be something to be careful of.

Mac doesn't support nearly 10 year old unicode standards?