¿©hara¢ter(s)! is a cheat sheet for special characters. It is an easy-to-use web application, displaying the common typographic special characters and their shortcodes to make their daily usage as easy as possible. It is a quick typographic reference.
The ¿©hara¢ter(s)! website comes with a handful features: It provides shortcodes for Apple, Windows, Linux and HTML entities. The most important characters are displayed in a text environment, showing their common usage. An overview page shows all of them.
On the overview page a single mouse click on each character will copy the character to your clipboard, so it can be easily pasted in any document. The whole page can be displayed with several different typefaces, so it also works as a little type specimen. Switch between typeface on top of the page. Finally, all choices—platform and typeface—are stored in the url, so preferences can be bookmarked for the next visit.
The background: For many years I had a mouse pad from MetaDesign on my desk, which provided me with the most important hotkeys for correct quotations marks or the right dash and all that stuff. When I started working as a freelance designer in different agencies and places I usually didn’t carried it with me, but i missed it in my every day work. So the idea for a webpage was born. It started as a simple HTML website nad step by step more features were added. It finaly became the digital version of this mouse pad.
For questions about this project write to characters@viktonuebel.com.
The proper use of special characters and punctuation marks depends on the language you are writing in. Here is a couple of online sources on where to research about it:
- The Punctuation Guide for American and British punctuation rules.
- Smart Quotes for Smart People a quick and easy intorduction on quotes use.
- Practical Typography — all you need to know about Typography.
- Typefacts for a lot of excellent typographic explanations in German.
- Typoguide contains many information in and for French.
Thanks for help!
@typometre for the french Mac shortcodes. @benjaminhick for norwegian Mac shortcodes. @studiohetmes for dutch shortcodes. @luca_bogoni for help with italian shortcodes.
