Fleuron (typography)

❧ A fleuron (/ˈflʊərɒn, -ən, ˈflɜːrɒn, -ən/)^[1] is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves; the term derives from the Old French word floron, for flower.^[2] Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats."^[3] It is also known as a printers' flower, or more formally as an aldus leaf (after Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius), hedera leaf ("ivy leaf"), or simply hedera symbol.

History

One of the oldest typographic ornaments, in early Greek and Latin texts, the hedera was used as an inline character to divide paragraphs, similarly to the pilcrow.^[4] It can also be used to fill the white space that result from the indentation of the first line of a paragraph,^[5] on a line by itself to divide paragraphs in a highly stylized way, to divide lists, or for pure ornamentation.^[6]

In more modern historic books, line breaks became more common as paragraph dividers, and fleurons became popular to create ornamented borders. Fleurons were crafted the same way as other typographic elements were: as individual metal sorts that could be fit into the printer's compositions alongside letter and numbers. This saved the printer time and effort in producing ornamentation. Because the sorts could be produced in multiples, printers could build up borders with repeating patterns of fleurons.

Use with computers

Designers continue to produce fleurons for use in digital typefaces. Typefaces with fleurons available online include:

• Hoefler Text, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones^[7]
• ITC Bodoni Ornaments, at Linotype and included with Mac OS X^[8]
• IM Fell Flowers, an open-source release of the Fell Types preserving the irregularities of the original 17th-century designs.^[9]
• Fleurons Granjon, a Lanston font at P22 type foundry^[10]
• Monotype Goudy Sorts, at Linotype^[11]
• Printers Fleurons, by Gerald Giampa, a Lanston font at P22 type foundry^[12]
• Requiem, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones^[13]
• Rieven type family, by Steven Skaggs, at Delve Fonts^[14]

Unicode

In Unicode standards, the Symbols category includes fleurons referred to as "floral hearts" in the Dingbats & Miscellaneous Symbols blocks:

• U+2766 ❦ floral heart (HTML ❦) (Dingbats)
• U+2767 ❧ rotated floral heart bullet (HTML ❧) (Dingbats)
• U+2619 ☙ reversed rotated floral heart bullet (HTML ☙) (Miscellaneous Symbols)

Twenty-four fleurons originally found in the Wingdings and Wingdings 2 fonts have been included in Unicode 7.0 under its new Ornamental Dingbats block.

Gallery

• 
  Early printers sought to use fleurons to replicate the style of manuscripts like this one.
• 
  Specimens of printed floral borders from an 1897 type foundry specimen book.
• 
  Example fleuron glyphs from a digital font.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fleurons and Aldus leaf.

• Book cover printed using fleuron designs