What is the meaning of the Carriage Return symbol in MSO Word?

The symbols have different meanings:

↲ - is used to indicate a line break where the paragraph does not end. This can be useful for formatting and presentation, especially as the formatting between paragraphs can be different. (not quite the same symbol as Word uses, apologies)
¶ - called a Pilcrow, and originates from the middle ages. It indicates the end of a paragraph. As you can see from my screenshot below, Word (and many other things including web pages) have the concept of "paragraphs", allowing for formatting to be different between paragraphs (i.e: the additional space below), and for the first line of a paragraph to be indented, etc...

In HTML the above could be given as follows:

<p>
  Paragraph 1, Sentence 1.<br>
  Paragraph 1, Sentence 2.
</p>
<p>
  Paragraph 2, Sentence 1.
  Paragraph 2, Sentence 2.
</p>
</p>
<p>
  &tab;Indented by a tab.
</p>

Attie

Posted 2020-01-08T21:23:42.270

Reputation: 14 841

Based on my knowledge, "↲" is also the Paragraph mark when you choose East Asian languages as Office display language, such as Chinese. – Emily Hua – 2020-01-09T09:29:51.307

Oh interesting... do you know what they use in place of the Pilcrow in that situation? I wonder if there are other things I don't know about (like the concept of "Paragraph" being unsuitable perhaps?)... Would you be willing to share a screenshot that follows the format I've presented? (It would be good to include in my answer as a variation - or feel free to edit my answer) – Attie – 2020-01-09T15:09:33.060

What is the meaning of the Carriage Return symbol in MSO Word?

Answers