Help:Special characters

"Wikipedia:Characters" redirects here. For fictional characters, see Wikipedia:Notability (fiction).

Many characters not on the standard computer keyboard will be useful—even necessary—for projects in a non-Latin-alphabet language. This page contains recommendations for which characters are safe to use and how to enter them.

Editing

See Help:Entering special characters.

Viewing

Most current browsers have some level of Unicode support but some do it better than others. The most commonly encountered problem is that browsers running on Windows XP rely on preconfigured font links in the registry rather than actually searching for a font that can display the character in question. This means that the browser often had to be forced to use particular fonts. On English Wikipedia there are a set of templates to do this. For example {{unicode}} for general Unicode text and {{IPA}} for the International Phonetic Alphabet. The stuff in Windows Glyph List 4 should be safe to use without such special measures.

Windows 7

Unicode support is extended through installing the optional standalone Windows Update package KB2729094, available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center. This backport from Windows 8 updates the Segoe UI font by adding browser support for Emoji and other symbols to Windows 7.

Displaying special characters

To display Unicode or special characters on web page(s), one or more of the Unicode fonts need to be present or installed in your computer, first. For proper working functionality, setup or configuration or settings from the web page viewing browser software also needs to be modified.

The default font for Latin scripts in older versions of the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser for Windows is Times New Roman. Older editions of the font don't include many Unicode blocks. To properly view special characters in IE, you must set your browser font settings to a font that includes many Unicode blocks of characters, such as TITUS Cyberbit Basic and GNU Unifont, which are freely available.

Special symbols should display properly without further configuration with Konqueror, Opera, Safari and most other recent browsers. An optional step can be taken for better (and correct) display of characters with ligature forms, combined characters, after the previously mentioned steps were followed, is to install a rendering engine software.

With Mozilla Firefox, the default setting must be changed. To do that, click on 'Options' in the 'Tools' menu and select the 'Content' icon. On that menu click 'Advanced' under 'Fonts and Colors'. Uncheck the default box "allow pages to choose their own fonts", and choose one of the Unicode options (for example, "Unicode (UTF-32BE)") or "Arabic (ISO-8859-6)" in the 'Default character encoding' box. An alternative is to switch font to 'Arial Unicode MS'. Then the default box can be left checked.

To use one of the available Unicode fonts for displaying special characters inside a table or chart or box, specify the class="Unicode" in the table's TR row tag (or, in each TD tag, but using it in each TR is easier than using it in each TD), in wiki table code, use that after the (TR equivalent) |- (e.g., |- class="Unicode").

For displaying individual special characters, template code {{Unicode|char}} can be used for each character. HTML decimal or hexadecimal numeric entity codes can be used in the place of the char. If a paragraph with lots of special Unicode characters needs to be displayed, then, <p class="Unicode"> ... </p>, or, <span class="Unicode"> ... </span> can also be used.

The class="Unicode" is to be used in web page(s), HTML or wiki tags, where various characters from wide range of various Unicode blocks need to be displayed. If the special characters that need to be displayed on web page(s) are mostly covering fewer Unicode blocks, related to Latin scripts, then class="latinx" can be used. For special characters or symbols related to International Phonetic Alphabet, class="IPA" can be used. For polytonic (Greek) characters or related symbols, class="polytonic" can be used.

Changing Internet Explorer's (IE) default font

From the IE menu bar, follow this path:  Tools > Internet Options > (General tab >) Fonts > Webpage Font:
to a scrolling list of fonts. As indicated above, the default selection for Windows is Times New Roman. For viewing of many special characters, select a different font, such as Lucida Sans Unicode, and then select OK.

Fonts for specific writing systems

Ancient scripts

e.g. Phoenician alphabet, Old Italic alphabet, Linear B, etc.

Windows users

Please download and install one of these freely licensed fonts

• Aegean
• Akkadian/Cuneiform
• Cardo
• MPH 2B Damase
• Code2001
• Junicode

Linux users

If using a Debian-based Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Linux Mint), please download and install deb package ttf-ancient-fonts by entering in terminal:

sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts

Shavian text

• Copyleft font is available from here.

Glagolitic text

• MPH 2B from here.

IPA symbols

Most IPA symbols are not included in the most widely used form of Times New Roman (though they are included in the version provided with Windows Vista), the default font for Latin scripts in Internet Explorer for Windows. To properly view IPA symbols in that browser, you must set it to use a font which includes the IPA extensions characters. Such fonts include Lucida Sans Unicode, which comes with Windows XP; Gentium, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, DejaVu Sans, or TITUS Cyberbit, which are freely available; or Arial Unicode MS, which comes with Microsoft Office.

On this page, we have forced Internet Explorer to use such a font by default, so it should appear correctly, but this has not yet been done to all the other pages containing IPA. This also applies to other pages using special symbols. Bear this in mind if you see error symbols such as "຦" in articles.

Special symbols should display properly without further configuration with Mozilla Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Safari and most other recent browsers.

What character encoding is Wikipedia using?

From MediaWiki 1.5, all projects use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.

Until the end of June 2005, when this new version came into use on Wikimedia projects, the English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Wikipedias used Windows-1252 (they declared themselves to be ISO-8859-1 but in reality browsers treat the two as synonymous and the MediaWiki software made no attempt to prevent use of characters exclusive to windows-1252). Pre-upgrade wikitext in their databases remains stored in Windows-1252 and is converted on load (some of it may also have been converted by gradual changes in the way history is stored). Edits made since the upgrade will be stored as UTF-8 in the database. This conversion on load process is invisible to users. It is also invisible to reusers as Wikimedia now uses XML dumps rather than database dumps.

Unicode (UTF-8)

• a variable number of bytes per character
• special characters, including CJK characters, can be treated like normal ones; not only the webpage, but also the edit box shows the character; in addition it is possible to use the multi-character codes; they are not automatically converted in the edit box.

ISO 8859-1

• one byte per character
• special characters that are not available in the limited character set are stored in the form of a multi-character code; there are usually two or three equivalent representations, e.g. for the character € the named character reference € and the decimal character reference € and the hexadecimal character reference €. The edit box shows the entered code, the webpage the resulting character. Unavailable characters which are copied into the edit box are first displayed as the character, and automatically converted to their decimal codes on Preview or Save.
• the most common special characters, such as é, are in the character set, so code like é, although allowed, is not needed.

Note that Special:Export exports using UTF-8 even if the database is encoded in ISO 8859-1, at least that was the case for the English Wikipedia, already when it used version 1.4.

To find out which character set applies in a project, use the browser's "View Source" feature and look for something like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

or

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

See also

• Unicode font
• Unicode input
• Wikipedia:Mathematical symbols
• Help:Wiki markup
• Help:Displaying a formula
• Help:Turkish characters

External links

• http://www.unicode.org/charts/ Unicode character charts; hexadecimal numbers only; PDF files showing all characters independent of browser capabilities
• http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html Help for enabling Unicode support on most platforms
• Table of Unicode characters from 1 to 65535—shows how the decimal character references look in one's browser
• HTML 4.0 Character Entity References—shows how the named and decimal character references look in one's browser
• FileFormat.Info—details of many Unicode characters, including the named, decimal and hexadecimal character reference, showing how it should look and for each, how it looks in one's browser
• Alan Wood's Unicode resources—comprehensive resource with character test pages for all Unicode ranges, as well as OS-specific Unicode support information and links to fonts and utilities
• CharacterPal—Free Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that displays key combinations for special characters
• Unicode Code Converter—conversion between copy-pasteable characters, Unicode notation, html, percent encodings and other formats, helpful when trying to enter or interpret characters
• Shapecatcher—online tool to find Unicode characters by drawing them