In typography, a bullet ( • ) is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:
It is likely that the name originated from the resemblance of the traditional circular bullet symbol (•) to an actual bullet.
The bullet symbol may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diamond, arrow, etc., and typical word processor software offer a wide selection of shapes and colours. Several regular symbols are conventionally used in ASCII-only text or another environments where bullet characters are not available, such as * (asterisk), - (hyphen), . (period), and even o (lowercase O). Of course, when writing by hand, bullets may be drawn in any style.
Bullets are most often used in technical writing, reference works, notes and presentations.
Example:
Where are bullets most often used?
An alternative method is to use a numbered list.
Bulleted items – known as "bullet points" – may be short phrases, single sentences, or of paragraph length. Bulleted items are not usually terminated with a full stop if they are not complete sentences, although it is a common practice to terminate every item except the last one with a semicolon, and terminate the last item with a full stop. It is correct to terminate a bullet point with a full stop if the text within that item consists of one 'full' sentence or more.
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In computing, a newline, also known as a line break or end-of-line (EOL) marker, is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text. The name comes from the fact that the next character after the newline will appear on a new line—that is, on the next line below the text immediately preceding the newline. The actual codes representing a newline vary across operating systems, which can be a problem when exchanging text files between systems with different newline representations.
There is also some confusion whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e. to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it is not newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line.
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