Adding special characters to text in Windows documents

Character Map
Accessing the Character Map
Changing the font displayed
Selecting a character
Inserting your character

Common Problems
Wrong font selected
Program doesn't support fonts or extended characters

The information in this document relates to all versions of Windows and while the instructions and examples are specific to Windows XP, they will vary only slightly in other versions.

The standard QWERTY keyboard that comes with a computer (so-called because these are the first six letters on the top row) is fairly limited when it comes to adding special characters to a document.

There is a massive collection of different fonts now available to computer users and even the most basic come with many more characters than appear on a QWERTY keyboard.

The following diagram shows a small selection of the characters that are available with the standard Windows Arial font.

There are also special fonts that don't have any standard letters, and are collections of symbols. For instance, the following diagram shows a selection of the characters available in the Windows WingDings font:

A font is just a collection of images, each one represented by a code. There are standard codes for most of the characters you are likely to use (for example the letter U has the code of 55). Fonts that display standard characters will always match the characters to the same codes.

Fortunately, all versions of Windows come with a handy little utility that allows you to insert these special characters - Character Map

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Character Map

Accessing the Character Map

The following instructions relate to Windows XP. However, all versions of Windows have the Character Map, it may look slightly different and may be found in a different location.

To run the Character Map utility, click on Start, All Programs, Accessories and then System Tools (it's pretty well hidden!).

The utility will run and you will see a window similar to the one in the picture above this section.

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Changing the font displayed

At the top of this new window you will see a drop-down menu that allows you to select the font you want to use.

Click on the arrow button to display the list of available fonts - you may be surprised how many fonts there are on your computer! Windows has a large collection when it is first installed, and when you install other programs it is common for them to install extra ones.

Different fonts have different characters, so don't assume that just because a character is available in one font that it will be available in others.

Selecting a character

First select the font you are interested in - you may know the character you want, but not be sure which is the best font for it ... you will need to look through the fonts until you find it!

Choose the character that you want to insert into your document and left-click on it.

You will notice in this diagram that the chosen character is shown larger than the others. Depending on your version of Windows this may or may not be the case. In earlier versions of Windows the chosen character is not so obviously highlighted.

To actually select this character, you could have double left-clicked on it. Alternatively, with it highlighted click on the Select button.

The character will now appear in the box at the bottom of the window:

When you are happy that the character(s) you want to insert into your document are now showing in the bottom box, click on the Copy button.

You will notice that when you choose or select a letter a code appears in the bottom right corner of the Character Map window (in the example above it's Alt+0169). You can avoid copying and pasting characters by using this code.

In the document you want to insert the special character into, make sure the cursor is where you want the character to appear. Then type the code displayed - in this case hold down the Alt key and type 0169 on the numeric keypad to the right of the keyboard

I tend to avoid using these codes as working out exactly what the code is can be tricky! Typing the wrong keys while holding down Alt can have some very strange results.

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Inserting your character

Return to the document within which you want to insert the chosen character, and ensure that the cursor is at the location where you want to insert it.

Now select Edit, Paste from the application's main menu (this is the bar at the top of the program window).

Alternatively, if you hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard, and press v (then release both keys) the character will appear.

Ctrl+v is a handy shortcut for pasting the contents of the Windows clipboard. If you are used to using the keyboard more than the mouse, it can save time.

If the character that appears isn't the one that you are expecting it will be for one of the following reasons...

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Common Problems

If the character you are expecting doesn't appear (or something completely different appears in it's place!) it's likely to be due to one of two reasons:

Wrong font selected
Program doesn't support fonts or extended characters

Wrong font selected

After you insert the new character into your text you need to remember to change it's font to the one you selected in the Character Map.

For example, suppose you were creating a document with a standard Times Roman font and wanted to add a tick mark from the WingDings font. When you insert the new character into the text it may initially look like this:

If you then select the newly inserted character and change it's font to the correct WingDings it will look a lot better:

This problem may or may not occur depending on the program. Most newer versions of Microsoft programs will automatically change the font of the inserted character to match what you selected in the Character Map.

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Program doesn't support fonts or extended characters

Some text editors don't support different fonts. For example, Notepad is a very simple text editor supplied with Windows and is not designed to do anything more complex than that.

In later versions of Notepad you can change the font, although you can't have more than one font applied to a document. So you can't mix and match font characters.

There are other programs that have similar restrictions, so if you find you are unable to change the font of individual characters it probably means that you can only use the standard ones (and possibly also the extended characters needed for foreign language support).