How to represent tally/five-bar-gate in unicode?

Are there Unicode characters to represent bundles (and partial bundles) of 5 in the style of the tally/five-bar-gate?

If not, what would be the most standard/semantic/accessible solution to this problem?

Things I've tried but don't like:

• Using the numbers 1-5 - easily confusing (3 bundles of 5 looks like 555)
• 1-4 pipes with strike-through for '5' - semantically messy, strike-through not reliably portable
• Ogham letter Straif for '5' - non-contiguous/not-associated with representations of 1-4 (all Ogham characters contain the horizontal line)
• Images with a descriptive alt tag - only works for the web, verbose for text-only browsers/screen readers.

References:

• Wikipedia's page on tally notation shows nice Asian and Latin American systems. My audience is mostly European, but a method in these styles would be acceptable if the five-bar-gate is not possible.

Thanks a lot!

5 Answers

You could use 卌 U+534C (in fact, it's a Chinese symbol for 40)

A proposal to include “Western-style tally marks” (L2/16-065, PDF) was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee in May 2016.

This introduces two characters:

• u1D377 - TALLY MARK ONE - 𝍷
• u1D378 - TALLY MARK FIVE - 𝍸

As of early 2018, these characters are “accepted by UTC and in active ISO technical ballot (or on hold for ballot)”. Their adoption progress can be monitored in the proposed characters pipeline.

Use four vertical bars with strikethrough text.

||||

GfBo

The closest thing Unicode has to tally marks are the counting rod numerals.

𝍠 U+1D360 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT ONE 𝍡 U+1D361 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT TWO 𝍢 U+1D362 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT THREE 𝍣 U+1D363 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT FOUR 𝍤 U+1D364 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT FIVE 𝍥 U+1D365 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT SIX 𝍦 U+1D366 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT SEVEN 𝍧 U+1D367 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT EIGHT 𝍨 U+1D368 COUNTING ROD UNIT DIGIT NINE 𝍩 U+1D369 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT ONE 𝍪 U+1D36A COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT TWO 𝍫 U+1D36B COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT THREE 𝍬 U+1D36C COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT FOUR 𝍭 U+1D36D COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT FIVE 𝍮 U+1D36E COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SIX 𝍯 U+1D36F COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SEVEN 𝍰 U+1D370 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT EIGHT 𝍱 U+1D371 COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT NINE 

As far as I can tell, there is no |||| character.

I personally just copy and paste this string:

||̸|| 

It's four of the ASCII vertical bar with one Unicode "combining long solidus overlay" sandwiched in between.

To be quite clear, it's the sequence of five characters specified by these Unicode code points:

• U+007C
• U+007C
• U+0338
• U+007C
• U+007C