Which tool is better Windows Charmap, Mac OS X Character Palette or the web-based CopyPasteCharacter.com?
Five years ago I wrote the following tip:
Charmap – Oddball Characters
We all need to insert strange characters into our text from time-to-time, whether it’s the copyright © symbol or the symbol for degree °, or a fraction. You can use Word’s Insert Symbol menu command to accomplish this or charmap.exe to search for that character. One problem with both of these methods is that you are presented with a table of all the characters and it is often hard to find that special graphic symbol when looking at so many.
The solution to this conundrum is
1. Run charmap (Select the Start button, then Run…, type in ‘charmap’ and press OK or hit Enter on the keyboard)
2. Check the Advanced View checkbox
3. Select Unicode for the ‘Character Set’ combobox
4. Select Unicode Subrange for the Group by combobox
5. A small Group By window will open with a list of choices to group characters by.
Now all you have to search through is a subset of the characters rather than the several hundred characters in the font.
–End of old tip–
CopyPasteCharacter.com
If you want to quickly grab some of these characters from any computer point your browser to http://www.copypastecharacter.com/
When you select a character on this Adobe Flash page it is automatically copied into the computer’s copy/paste buffer. Select Paste from the cursor context menu to put it into your document.
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