Welcome to Toolpaq

Special Characters

Manual

1. You don't need to read this manual in order to operate Special Characters Generator. We believe the interface is intuitive.
2. The aim of this device is to give you an opportunity to use all the UTF-8 characters that cannot be typed directly with keyboard. Have you ever seen hearts on Facebook or MySpace? There are a couple of methods of inserting them into text message, along with pressing Alt key and entering the character code on the numeric keyboard (and there are different methods for Mac and for Windows). Here however, you don't have to remember all those codes. Here, special characters are available as ordinary buttons that insert hearts, smiles, and a wide variety of other signs into the text you are typing. Then, you can copy and paste your text wherever you want.
3. Special characters are accepted only on websites that use UTF-8 encoding. Fortunately, most of the popular websites like Facebook or Tweeter use this feature. However, you should be careful while sending them in an e-mail. You need to check if the proper character encoding has been selected.
4. A few examples are provided in order to show basic opportunities of this website.
5. You can use your on-screen Special Keyboard to insert characters directly into text. You can also insert their codes and click "Generate" button. Then, all the codes will be translated into glyphs. If your browser doesn't support JavaScript, you have to enter codes manually and use "Generate" button.
6. You can enter character codes by marking "Enter source code" checkbox and pressing keys on your Special Keyboard or you can type them. While typing, make sure that your code is in square brackets, e.g. "[1234]". You can also use hexadecimal base, e.g. "[0x34fa]".
7. You can choose Special Keyboard you want by choosing it from drop-down menu and clicking "Go!" button. Each Special Keyboard contains different sets of characters. So far following character sets are available:
   • Arabic
   • Basic Latin
   • Combos
   • Cyrillic
   • Devanagari
   • Extensions for Latin (language specific signs)
   • Greek and Coptic
   • Han / Kanji (Chinese alphabet)
   • Hebrew
   • Hiragana and Katakana (Japanese alphabets)
   • Miscellaneous
   • Miscellaneous (designed for IE6 users)
   • Phonetic symbols
   • Runic
   • Tables, boxes, geometry
   • Technical symbols
   • Thai
   If you believe there are characters that are useful but are not covered by our Special Keyboards, let us know! We will do our best to include those characters as soon as possible. You can find all the characters on our Special Chas Tables or on Unicode website.
8. Be careful while switching to Han (Kanji) Special Keyboard. It contains more than 27 thousands characters. Therefore it may take several minutes before your browser loads the entire keyboard. It takes 30 seconds to load it with Google Chrome on a computer with 2.8 GHz quad core processor.
9. You can change the font and its size to see how exactly your message is going to look like. You can use predefined font from most popular websites. If you think there is another website that deserves its own button let us know.
10. Most commonly used fonts are: Arial, Arial Black, Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Comic Sans MS, Courier, Courier New, Garamond, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans Unicode, MS Sans Serif, MS Serif, Palatino Linotype, Symbol, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Webdings, Wingdings. The last two are especially interesting when it comes to special characters.
11. Glyphs vary not only from font to font but also from browser to browser. Some browser does not implement all the characters. Especially Internet Explorer 6 deals with UTF-8 poorly. We've created a Special Keyboard that contains the subset of chars of Miscellaneous Special Keyboard that are supported by IE6, so that you can be sure that the users of this ancient browser (that unfortunately still constitute significant share of the market) see what you would like them to see.
12. Even modern browsers not always implement all the characters. Firefox (3.6.3) and Opera (10.51) deals with UTF-8 very well (although not perfectly). Google Chrome (4.1) doesn't display some chars, e.g. on Hebrew or Runic Special Keyboards. Safari (4.0.5) and Internet Explorer 8 are slightly better but they also have some troubles with for instance some Technical symbols. They display white spaces or empty squares instead. The availability of characters vary also across operating systems. Our Special Keyboards have been optimized for Windows 7 and Firefox (3.6.3).
13. Send us any remarks that come to your mind!