Quick brown box

There is no definitive sample text—no “quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” pangram, or “handgloves” phrase—for box drawing glyphs. If you used the box drawing glyph generating script from my last email, you might notice: they are challenging to actually write out, in a realistic way.

You don’t want ASCII Art, or something that incorporates other glyphs you might not have actually designed yet. You just want something that only uses these glyphs alone, and shows how they work together to align.

The best option I found is this old W3C text file (scroll right to the bottom) a few places link back to, which was apparently converted from another format years earlier:

It works well as test content you can paste into your editor. The W3C adopted a new content license in the months after this was published, and to me it doesn’t appear to apply retroactively to this, so I wouldn’t recommend reproducing it in a specimen.

It’s fairly unlikely the box drawing glyphs get high billing in your specimens anyway. I’ll write to you about more typical specimen content in the new year!

Until next time,
Kenneth