I am writing documentation for a software product.

I want to separate links leading to another site from links within the same one.

Wikipedia has special picture denoting such links. But this is their own decision. Is there something common and universal? I suspect there is some Unicode character, but so far I haven’t found anything better than ⎆ .

Answer 1, authority 100%

there seems to be no approved (and thus somewhat “generally accepted”) symbol for external links in unicode .

Proposal to Encode an External Link Sign , As far as I understand, this is still just a suggestion.

by the way, ^T _E ^X -ologists have this, of course, have your own options .