You've seen tons of text symbols on Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. Special
characters rose to popularity along with social networking. Most text signs,
like ♥ aren't really used in books and references, but are easily recognisable
graphemes.
Main reasons why symbols are rising to prominence are that they convey
same meaning as words, but in a smaller space and they are well recognised
among all internet users across the globe independent of their language,
culture or ethnicity. Another reason is that they are often used as building
blocks of text pictures to depict different emotions, concepts, images
and other stuff (✿◠‿◠) You can type symbols right from your keyboard. I'm
going to show you how. Also, if you want to check out all the symbols you
have in each of font you got installed on your computer, check out Character
Maps. ≧◔◡◔≦
Alt codes
Shortcut technique that works on Desktops and most Laptops running MS
Windows. You press Alt and, while holding it, type a code on Num Pad. It's
very easy, but not as practical for long-term usage as Shift States. Also,
you can type many frequently used symbols with this method, but not all
like with Shift States.
Shift states
Want to access symbols really fast from your keyboard? Install my custom
keyboard layout. E̲n̲t̲i̲r̲e̲l̲y̲ free. Includes source file, so you can
edit it the way you want.
Configure your keyboard layout in Windows so that you can type all additional
symbols you want as easy as any other text. Takes about 5-10 minutes to
set things up, but you'll be typing like a boss.
Character map
CharMap allows you to view and use all characters and symbols available
in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings")
installed on your computer.
Emoji on iOS
Simple and beautiful way to discover how to add a virtual keyboard for
Emoji symbols visible as small pictures. The keyboard itself is preinstalled
on your iOS device, so you don't have to download, or buy anything.
Keyboard viewer
You can make frequently used technical non-fancy symbols like "√ ∑ π ∞
∆ ™ © æ £ ¢" and åccénted letters on Mac using [Option] key. I've compiled
a list of shortcuts in my article and explained how to open keyboard viewer.
You can also use your Keyboard Viewer as an alternative to my list.
Character palette
Character Palette allows you to view and use all characters and symbols
available in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New
Roman", "Webdings") installed on your computer.
Keyboard codes
Character map
Character map allows you to view and use all characters and symbols available
in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings")
installed on your computer. It can also help you lookup Unicode codes for
entering symbols with keyboard.
Apps
Right now the only way I found which can help you out is with the use
of free Apps like custom
character map
or a
custom keyboard layout app
. Also I intend to make an FSymbols app in some near future, but as for
now check out Android's Google Play.
HTML Symbols
If you want to put these symbols on your Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, or
some other website - just copy-paste those symbols. But if you want to
put them into HTML code of your own website - you might want to use these
codes. Just copy, or type in symbol's HTML entity, either hex (&#xHEX_CODE;),
or decimal (&#DECIMAL_CODE;), onto your website's source code.
Special characters in HTML. A list of special text characters and their
HTML entity codes. Encoded HTML chars and their symbol codes.
Javascript tool to convert your text with symbols into HTML, or Javascript
character entities. You can insert the whole text and it will just escape
special characters, leaving other characters alone. You can leave tags
and ampersands unconverted.
Alt codes
Shortcut technique that works on Desktops and most Laptops running MS
Windows. You press Alt and, while holding it, type a code on Num Pad. It's
very easy, but not as practical for long-term usage as Shift States. Also,
you can type many frequently used symbols with this method, but not all
like with Shift States.
Shift states
Want to access symbols really fast from your keyboard? Install my custom
keyboard layout. E̲n̲t̲i̲r̲e̲l̲y̲ free. Includes source file, so you can
edit it the way you want.
Configure your keyboard layout in Windows so that you can type all additional
symbols you want as easy as any other text. Takes about 5-10 minutes to
set things up, but you'll be typing like a boss.
Character map
CharMap allows you to view and use all characters and symbols available
in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings")
installed on your computer.