How to Use Special Characters in Windows Documents

Summary

This article describes how to use special characters that are available through the Character Map, and how to manually type the Unicode number to insert a special character into a document. You can do this to add special characters to your documents such as a trademark or degree symbol:

More Information

You can use Character Map to view the characters that are available for a selected font. Character Map displays the following character sets:

You can copy individual characters or a group of characters to the clipboard, and then paste them into any compatible program. Or, depending on the program you are using (such as WordPad), you can even copy characters by dragging them from Character Map directly into an open document.

You can use Character Map to search for characters by viewing the Unicode character maps that are associated with each font. Select the character in the font you select to display the Unicode identifier. If you know the Unicode equivalent of the character that you want to insert, you can also insert a special character directly into a document without using Character Map.

To start Character Map and see all of the available characters for a particular font, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Character Map.

If Character Map is not installed, you must install Character Map:

Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then click Add/Remove Programs.

Click the Windows Setup tab.

Click System Tools (click the words, not the check box), and then click Details.

Click to select the Character Map check box, click OK, and then click OK.

You can use one of the following methods to insert special characters from Character Map into a document in a compatible program.

Method 1

To copy individual characters or a group of characters to the clipboard and then paste them into a program:

Start Character Map.

In the Font box, click the font you want to use.

Click the special character that you want to insert, click Select, and then click Copy.

In your document, position the insertion point where you want the special character to appear.

On the Edit menu, click Paste. You can also copy characters by dragging them from Character Map directly into an open document.

Method 2

To insert a special character by using the Unicode value:

In your document, position the insertion point where you want the special character to appear.

Press and hold down the ALT key while you type the four number Unicode value for the character. Note that NUM LOCK must be on, and you have to use the number pad keys to type the Unicode character value.

To determine what the Unicode value is for a particular character:

Start Character Map.

In the Font box, click the font you want to use.

Click the special character that you want to use. The Unicode number that corresponds to the character you select appears in the lower right corner of the window.

Unicode

Unicode is a character standard that represents almost all of the written languages of the world. The Unicode characters have multiple representation forms, including UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. Most Windows interfaces use the UTF-16 form. For more information about Unicode, please view the following Unicode Web site:

About Special Characters

Short description

Describes the special character sequences that control how PowerShell interprets the next characters in the sequence.

Long description

PowerShell supports a set of special character sequences that are used to represent characters that aren’t part of the standard character set. The sequences are commonly known as escape sequences.

Escape sequences begin with the backtick character, known as the grave accent (ASCII 96), and are case-sensitive. The backtick character can also be referred to as the escape character.

Escape sequences are only interpreted when contained in double-quoted ( » ) strings.

PowerShell recognizes these escape sequences:

Sequence	Description
`0	Null
`a	Alert
`b	Backspace
`e	Escape
`f	Form feed
`n	New line
`r	Carriage return
`t	Horizontal tab
`u	Unicode escape sequence
`v	Vertical tab

PowerShell also has a special token to mark where you want parsing to stop. All characters that follow this token are used as literal values that aren’t interpreted.

Special parsing token:

Sequence	Description
—%	Stop parsing anything that follows

Null (`0)

The null ( `0 ) character appears as an empty space in PowerShell output. This functionality allows you to use PowerShell to read and process text files that use null characters, such as string termination or record termination indicators. The null special character isn’t equivalent to the $null variable, which stores a null value.

Alert (`a)

The alert ( `a ) character sends a beep signal to the computer’s speaker. You can use this character to warn a user about an impending action. The following example sends two beep signals to the local computer’s speaker.

Backspace (`b)

The backspace ( `b ) character moves the cursor back one character, but it doesn’t delete any characters.

The example writes the word backup and then moves the cursor back twice. Then, at the new position, writes a space followed by the word out.

Escape (`e)

The escape ( `e ) character is most commonly used to specify a virtual terminal sequence (ANSI escape sequence) that modifies the color of text and other text attributes such as bolding and underlining. These sequences can also be used for cursor positioning and scrolling. The PowerShell host must support virtual terminal sequences. You can check the boolean value of $Host.UI.SupportsVirtualTerminal to determine if these ANSI sequences are supported.

For more information about ANSI escape sequences, see ANSI_escape_code.

The following example outputs text with a green foreground color.

Form feed (`f)

The form feed ( `f ) character is a print instruction that ejects the current page and continues printing on the next page. The form feed character only affects printed documents. It doesn’t affect screen output.

New line (`n)

The new line ( `n ) character inserts a line break immediately after the character.

This example shows how to use the new line character to create line breaks in a Write-Host command.

Carriage return (`r)

The carriage return ( `r ) character moves the output cursor to the beginning of the current line and continues writing. Any characters on the current line are overwritten.

In this example, the text before the carriage return is overwritten.

Notice that the text before the `r character is not deleted, it is overwritten.

Horizontal tab (`t)

The horizontal tab ( `t ) character advances to the next tab stop and continues writing at that point. By default, the PowerShell console has a tab stop at every eighth space.

This example inserts two tabs between each column.

Unicode character (`u)

The Unicode escape sequence ( `u ) allows you to specify any Unicode character by the hexadecimal representation of its code point. This includes Unicode characters above the Basic Multilingual Plane (> 0xFFFF ) which includes emoji characters such as the thumbs up ( `u <1f44d>) character. The Unicode escape sequence requires at least one hexadecimal digit and supports up to six hexadecimal digits. The maximum hexadecimal value for the sequence is 10FFFF .

This example outputs the up down arrow (↕) symbol.

Vertical tab (`v)

The vertical tab ( `v ) character advances to the next vertical tab stop and writes the remaining output at that point. The rendering of the the vertical tab is device and terminal dependent.

The following examples show the rendered output of the vertical tab in some common environments.

The Windows Console host application interprets ( `v ) as a special character with no extra spacing added.

The Windows Terminal renders the vertical tab character as a carriage return and line feed. The rest of the output is printed at the beginning of the next line.

On printers or in a unix-based consoles, the vertical tab character advances to the next line and writes the remaining output at that point.

Stop-parsing token (—%)

The stop-parsing ( —% ) token prevents PowerShell from interpreting strings as PowerShell commands and expressions. This allows those strings to be passed to other programs for interpretation.

Place the stop-parsing token after the program name and before program arguments that might cause errors.

In this example, the Icacls command uses the stop-parsing token.

PowerShell sends the following string to Icacls .

Here is another example. The showArgs function outputs the values passed to it. In this example, we pass the variable named $HOME to the function twice.

You can see in the output that, for the first parameter, the variable $HOME is interpreted by PowerShell so that the value of the variable is passed to the function. The second use of $HOME comes after the stop-parsing token, so the string «$HOME» is passed to the function without interpretation.

For more information about the stop-parsing token, see about_Parsing.

How to type special characters on a Windows PC

You just have to know how to do it

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Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge

Here’s the situation: you’re typing a report for work, and you suddenly have to write the phrase “Jones née Berkowitz.” Or you are adding a phrase in Spanish and need to use the word “años.” How do you add the special characters to the letters?

Special characters (also known as diacritical marks) may be more common in certain languages, but there are plenty of circumstances in which English speakers may need to use them. But because they are so rare in English, native English speakers may not have learned how to add those marks to documents, emails, or other writings. It’s not difficult to add them to your Windows document, although it’s not quite as smooth an operation as on a Mac, where all you have to do is hold the appropriate key down. (In fact, once upon a time, you would have had to look up the symbol character codes. )

Use the touch keyboard

The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows touch keyboard. (Thanks to Ed Bott from ZDNet for first leading me to this method.) The touch keyboard automatically appears if you’re using a Windows tablet or if you’re using a PC in tablet mode. If you don’t have a touchscreen, you can use the keyboard icon that appears in the taskbar, on the right side near the date. Don’t see it? This is how you get it:

• Right-click on the taskbar
• Click on “Show touch keyboard button”

Click on “Show touch keyboard button.”

Now, when you want to use a special character:

• Click on the touch keyboard icon
• The touch keyboard will appear. Long press (with your mouse button or, if you have a touchscreen, your finger) on the letter you want to use
• You’ll now see several extra keys showing the ways you can type that letter with different symbols. Select the one you want, and it will appear on your document.
• If you want to enter an emoji, click on the emoji key (on the left of the “space bar”)

Select the special character you want, and it will appear on your document.

Use the emoji keyboard

Another keyboard that you can access and can let you easily add special characters to your text is Windows’ emoji keyboard. Yes, it is mainly for adding emojis to your text, but it’s got other uses as well. And it’s simple to use:

• Hold down the Windows key (the one with the Windows symbol on it) and hit the period key
• The emoji keyboard will pop up, showing a variety of emojis. Click on the symbols tab on top (the third from the left).

The emoji keyboard also lets you access special characters.

• Use the menu on the bottom line to select the type of symbol you’re looking for (if you’re looking for characters to use within text, you’ll probably want to select this one: Ç). Then scroll down until you find the character you want.

Use the character map

If you’d like to try a more old-fashioned method of adding special characters to Windows, you can use the character map, which is a less polished and more complicated version of the touch keyboard but offers a similar service.

To access it on your Windows 10 system:

• Type “character” in your search field and then select the Character Map app
• You’ll get a pop-up map showing a bunch of special characters for a specific font. You can change the font by clicking on the drop-down font menu at the top.

The character map lets you access a wide variety of special characters.

• Click on the letter(s) or special characters that you want to use in your document and then click on the “Select” button. They’ll appear in the “Characters to copy” field.
• Once you’ve selected all the characters you want, click on the “Copy” button and then paste the character(s) into your document

Use the US International Keyboard

If you’re an English speaker who is multilingual and uses special characters a lot, you may want to try the US International Keyboard, which maps your keyboard to more easily allow you to add special characters. (Thanks to “shiroledat” for the tip.)

First, you need to add the US International Keyboard to Windows:

• Go to Settings > Time & Language > Language
• Look for “Preferred languages” and (assuming you’re an English speaker in the US) click on “English (United States).” Then click on “Options.”
• Look for the “Keyboards” section, which (if you’ve never been there before) will probably only contain a single keyboard icon labeled “US / QWERTY.” That’s the keyboard map you’re now using. Click on “Add a keyboard” just above it.
• In the pop-up menu that appears, scroll to “United States-International / QWERTY” and click on it

Under “Preferred languages,” click on “English (United States)” and then on “Options.”

Click on “Add a keyboard” and look for “United States-International.”

Now you always have the choice of using either the standard US keyboard or the US International Keyboard. You can see which one is active in the lower-right side of your taskbar, near the date. It will either read “ENG / US” or “ENG / INTL.” You can click on that to switch from one to the other, or just hit Windows key+space bar.

Click on the icon to switch keyboards.

The US International Keyboard gives you two ways to add a special character:

• Use the right-hand Alt key in combination with the appropriate letter to get one of the more common combinations. For example, Alt+e will result in: é
• Press the symbol you want to use and then the letter you want to use it with. For example, if you first press the

symbol and then the “n” key, you’ll get: ñ

Washington State University has published a useful chart showing all of the symbols you can get using the US International Keyboard.

Use the Unicode value

If you look at the lower right-hand corner of the character map after you’ve chosen a letter or special character, you’ll see the word “Keystroke” followed by “Alt” and a four-digit number. This number represents the Unicode value of the symbol, and it’s the time-honored standard for adding characters.

If you use a few special characters consistently, it can be faster to simply add the character you want using your keyboard. There are several ways to do this; here are two of the easiest (each of which has its limitations):

• Press the Alt key and then type the four-digit Unicode value. For this to work, you need to have a separate number pad on your keyboard, and the NumLock key should be enabled.
• If you’re working with Microsoft Word, WordPad, Outlook, or another Microsoft app, you can type in the Unicode value and then type Alt-X
• You can also press the Control key plus a symbol, and then the letter you want to accent. For example, Ctrl+’ and “e” will result in “é” — assuming you’re in a Microsoft app.

Update March 26th, 10:50AM ET: This article has been updated to add a section on using the Unicode values and the emoji keyboard.

Update March 30th, 11:15AM ET: Updated to add another way to add special characters within Microsoft apps.

Update April 1st, 9:45AM ET: Updated to add information on the US International Keyboard.