Tip sheet on special characters

This page will show users (of the Windows or Macintosh OS X operating systems), having a western european “standard” keyboard (showing the latin alphabet), how to generate other characters they might not see on the keyboard. For example a US keyboard will not show accented letters as used in French. A French keyboard will show accented letters common in French, but not accented letters used in Spanish. And so on…

Special characters on Macintosh (Apple keyboards)

On MacOS, the option key functions as a modifier key like the shift key. Hold it down and press another key simultaneously. For shift+option, hold down both the shift and option keys and press the additional letter key simultaneously.

Special characters on Windows (PC keyboards)

On Windows, the Alt key functions as a modifier like the Shift key. To make special characters, hold down the Alt key and type in the numbers from the numeric keypad. Note that on the some small keyboards (e.g. laptop keybaords) the “numeric keypad” is found by pressing the NumLock key and then looking for the keys on your keyboard that double as numeric keypad keys when in NumLock mode.

Software to help you find special characters

Macintosh OS x

On Macintosh OS X, you can use the operating system’s character palette to find special characters. Press command+option+T to make the character palette window appear.

The character palette will also show up as a mneu item in the keyboard menu if the keyboard menu is displayed in the top right of your menu bar. The keyboard menu shows as a flag corresponding to the currently active keyboard layout.

See Apple support document Mac OS X: How to type special characters, including Symbol or Zapf Dingbat fonts.

Windows

For Windows, use the Character Map application, available from the Start Menu (look in System Tools).

Third-party software

(Note: I’m mentioning a useful little program because I use it at home on my Macintosh and a Windows machine and it helps you find a special character when you forget the key combination for it. Here’s how the author describes it:

If you don’t want to remember all these numbers, you should try the little shareware utility PopChar from ergonis software. One click, and PopChar displays a table of all characters of the current font. Select the desired character and it instantly appears in your document. You can also insert HTML symbols. PopChar is available for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Windows.)

Characters not listed on this page

For more HTML number codes, see Character entity references in HTML 4. For any characters not listed here, you can look at the Unicode character set, which is a whole subject in itself. Suffice it to say that any modern computer operating system and/or web browser can handle Unicode characters and Unicode documents: generating those characters is the tricky part.

Special character chart for western european characters

How to use this chart

You can use the html name or number codes in an HTML document (i.e. a webpage or an e-mail that uses HTML format.)

For Macintosh: press the keys as shown. for example “shift+option+w” means press down the shift key, the option key, and the w key all at the same time. “option+e E” means press down the option key and the e key at the same time, then press the E key (capital E).