For example: The bullet symbol may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diamond or arrow.
Typical word processor software offers a wide selection of shapes and colors.
(period), and even o (lowercase Latin letter O), are conventionally used in ASCII-only text or other environments where bullet characters are not available.
[2] The 1950 New York News Type Book is credited as the first style guide to include a defined use for bullets.
The Type Book described it as a typographic device to be used as an "Accessory" alongside asterisks, checks, and other marks available to people making advertisements for the News.
[a] The glyph was transposed into Unicode from the original IBM PC character set, Code page 437, where it had the code-point F916 (24910).
Glyphs such as •, ◦ and their reversed variants ◘, ◙ became available in text mode since early IBM PCs with MDA–CGA–EGA graphic adapters, because built-in screen fonts contained such forms at code points 7–10.