How’d They Do That‽

You’ve seen them in posts, I’ve seen them in posts, we’ve all seen them in posts (not to mention over the rest of the web).

The question at hand in this post, how do I get those “fancy characters” into my website/post/handout. Well, I’m here to tell you that, fortunately it is incredibly simple! Even more fortunately, you don’t need to install anything to find the characters.

The simple Windows utility to have all of these characters at your fingers (literally) is called the character map, and it is located in the accessories section (where the calculator application is located) of your start menu, specifically, within the folder “system tools”.

So a quick run through of how to find this, click the start menu in the bottom left hand corner of your screen. > hover over (or single click) all programs > look for, and highlight (hover over) the accessories folder > highlight the system tools folder > select character map.

Congratulations! You’ve made it! (I hope)

If you’ve made it here you can start looking through all the wonderful characters that are at your fingers (told you). So, by default the font is (usually) set to Arial, however, if you want the full gamut of potential characters switch the font (up at the top) to Arial Unicode MS, this will show the full list of characters available for use on the web. Now you can be at ease, knowing that you can use interrobangs ‽ instead of a question mark and an exclamation point. Or, my personal favorite, you can include the infinity symbol in your posts ∞ , or in my mothers case a heart ❤.

If you have any questions that you want answered in future posts (or about this one) leave it in the comments below!

Additionally I’d like to note that we are having a giveaway!

This giveaway features one free visual guide (yes, a guide with pictures) on the subject of your choosing, it will be printed on nice stock, bound (or sleeved) and mailed to you, as well as posted online as a downloadable PDF. Just shoot a tweet @anderstech, or leave a comment below with a link back to your blog to enter.