Down angled quote (« and ») in HTML

Question

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Does unicode or HTML have a vertical double guillemet (chevron)?

Is there a downwards facing alternative to &laquo and &raquo (« and » respectively)?

I have tried to find an answer elsewhere but to no avail. I assume css rotating the text is the only real answer.

Answer 1

The short answer to your question is "No, there aren't."

&laquo and &raquo are not actually intended as direction arrows, despite their frequent usage as such.

What they are actually intended for is hinted at by their entity names -- they're supposed to be "angled quotes".

Certain European countries (notably France) tend to use these characters for speech marks instead of the inverted-comma style quote marks that are more commonly used by the English speaking world, and that is what these characters are actually meant for -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet for more info.

Given this, it's hardly surprising that there aren't any up and down arrow variants of them.

Feel free to use them as directional arrows (everyone else does, even if the semantics are questionable), but don't expect them to have every variant you might want, because they're not graphics; they're typographical characters.

I guess if you really want to, you could use CSS to rotate the existing left and right arrows by 90 degrees. I wouldn't suggest it as a good idea though.