Double right arrowhead?

[Doug Ewell]

If one is looking for an existing character that looks like >>, but isn't a sequence of the two characters > and >, here are some suggested steps to take before one concludes that a New Character Must Be Proposed:

1. Look in the official code charts at https://www.unicode.org/charts/ . While there are a lot of blocks to choose from, including block elements and several each for arrows and math symbols, it is probably worth scanning them all to find what is needed and save some embarrassment later.

2. Look in a character-map tool. Windows provides Character Map; Mac provides Character Viewer, some versions of Linux provide GNOME Character Map (a.k.a. Gucharmap), etc. There are also third-party tools, such as BabelPad and BabelMap (https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html), available for a variety of platforms. One can browse through the glyphs, using whatever font(s) one prefers.

(Note that for both 1 and 2, do NOT, and I mean NOT, rely on character names alone. Look at the glyphs.)

3. There is a delightful online tool called Shapecatcher at https://shapecatcher.com/ . This site provides a box where one can use one‘s awesome mouse-drawing skills to draw the character one is looking for, click Recognize, and be presented with a list of existing characters that “match,” more or less. Some of the suggestions farther down the list are clearly bogus, and can be simply ignored. For people like me who have terrible mouse-drawing skills, one strategy is to try several times to draw the thing, and then look at the collected results.

Shapecatcher gave me the following suggestions for >>, along with the hallucinations:

Much greater-than: ≫
Unicode hexadecimal: 0x226b

Z notation schema piping: ⨠
Unicode hexadecimal: 0x2a20

Right-pointing double angle quotation mark: »
Unicode hexadecimal: 0xbb

Double nested greater-than: ⪢
Unicode hexadecimal: 0x2aa2

Double succeeds: ⪼
Unicode hexadecimal: 0x2abc

which are no worse really than many of the suggestions given in this thread. If one wants “it looks kinda like >>, but not exactly in some way,” well, then draw it.

4. One can always suck it up and continue to use <003E, 003E>. It is easy to type and pretty much universally understood.

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Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org