When the Down Arrow is not an Upside-Down Up Arrow (2022)

An investigation into why the Unicode Upwards and Downwards White Arrow characters render with different proportions on macOS. The mismatch turns out to be a font fallback issue: Lucida Grande (the macOS default) only implements the Upwards White Arrow glyph, likely inherited from Big5 encoding support for Traditional Chinese fonts, while the Downwards arrow falls back to a different font called STIXGeneral. The piece walks through Unicode code points, how fonts map glyphs, and offers a platform-independent trick using only the Upwards arrow (rotated) to render consistently across systems.

Source: https://thefloatingcontinent.com/blog/upside-down-arrow-unicode. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.