| Abstract: | As Carl Linnaeus realized over 300 years ago, although symbols are only simple visual elements, they can have a useful place in concise scientific plant descriptions. They provide specific information quickly, in a small page (and now screen) space and, being independent of language, once understood, are comprehensible to readers of all languages. The description of plant taxa involved in systematics requires botanical illustrations to be as accurate and informative as possible, and so, when developing a new style of digital composite illustration, the inclusion of botanical symbols was considered to both increase the information content and reduce ambiguity. A search into suitable existing botanical symbols revealed that there is no standard international botanical symbol set in current use, and that satisfactory symbols for some of the meanings needed do not exist. Furthermore, only some of those botanical symbols found were readily available as characters within standard software fonts. As a result, a new botanical symbol set and corresponding font were created. This contemporary symbol set combines well‐used traditional symbols, together with some that have been newly designed, and is suitable for both textual and image use within botanical documentation in the digital and increasingly image‐aware world. © 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2010, 162 , 117–129. |
