Unicode special characters at your advantage

25 November, 2010 | | 1 comments |

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I’m sure you would have come across Facebook status updates and Tweets having special characters which you don’t find them on your keyboard. These special characters convey expressions, feelings and adorn your text from aesthetics point-of-view.


Examples: ☺ ♣ ♥ ◘ ♫ ¿ ► ↔ » ☼ ■ ± √ ¼ Ω Ü £ ░  ... many more


Check the following examples on Facebook and Twitter


Facebook Update with special characters

Twitter Update with special characters


These are called Unicode Special Characters and there are many of them. You can use ALT codes to get these characters on screen. The idea is to keep the ALT key pressed and then type the CODE from your numeric keypad. Check the following Unicode special character list along with its equivalent ALT code. For language specific characters check Here.




Note:

  • Make sure you have the Num Lock ON.
  • You need the numeric keypad on your keyboard layout to use these codes else use the Character Map in Windows. Apple Mac OSX users can refer this link Here for using Unicode special characters. The ‘Character Map’ equivalent in Macintosh is known as Character Palette. You can read more on both of them below.
  • The ALT key has to be released once the code is typed.


■ How do I use Unicode special characters in Web Pages?

There are several ways you can type or import Unicode text, but each page must include a encoding meta tag specifying the utf-8 Unicode encoding, so that browsers render the text correctly. See the code below for HTML5:


  •  
  • <head>
  •  
  • <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  • ...
  •  
  • </head>


■ Use 'Character Map' in Windows if you don't have access to Web or can't remember ALT Codes:

Start → Run → charmap ↵


■ For Apple Macintosh users:

The ‘Character Map’ equivalent in Macintosh is known as Character Viewer. Read more on it Here.



1 comments:

Anonymous said...

quick-ref source:
http://usefulshortcuts.com/alt-codes/