Commonly it aligns either visually to the uppercase flat height and baseline or extends slightly above the uppercase flat height and descends to a value not greater than the lowercase descender. The advance width is proportional to the design of the slash. In italic fonts the backslash's angle is commonly more upright than in the roman font of the typeface. The advance width is proportional to the design. These characters were used on computer systems defined as, used to create vertical continuous or dashed lines.
Current use is to separate text or as a computer programming operator for 'or'.
There is no general rule in current usage of these characters. Vertically aligns with uppercase and the baseline. Vertically aligns so the bar connects vertically when the document is set solid with no leading. They are also used to calculate the values in the 'VDMX' table. Both these tables in Microsoft Windows define the vertical cell height.