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How to Create Symbol Characters
If you want your documents to look really professional, you need to know how to create symbol characters. This is very helpful when you need to type 72°, or 1½ inches or ACME®, or type words from foreign languages. Designers also point out that many people use inch " and foot ' marks (typewriter quotes) as apostrophes and quotation marks. This looks unprofessional in print, especially when using a serif font. Inch and foot marks should be straight (' and "), while quotation marks (“and ”) and apostrophes should be curved (for san-serif fonts).

Automatic Symbols
Programs such as Microsoft® Word can be set up to automatically replace your typed characters with the proper symbol. These programs also enable you to select and insert a specific symbol character. They can be set up to use “smart” quotes, so that you get nice curly quotation marks and apostrophes. Unfortunately, many other types of programs don’t have this nifty feature, so you may have to create symbols the hard way.

Typing Symbols From the Keypad
People often don’t know that most typical fonts include a bunch of symbols, if you just know how to get to them. Try this experiment:

Turn on the keyboard Num Lock. In your word processing or drawing program, select a typical everyday font such as Arial or Times. Now hold down the Alt key and use the number keypad to press 0 (zero) 1 8 9. On your screen you will see the number ½ appear. Cool, huh?

How do I Make the Symbol I Want?
Okay, now you’re asking, “how am I supposed to know what numbers to press to make the symbol I want?” Good question! I have an ancient, dog-eared printed list of these characters that I keep on my desk and use nearly every day. It was printed from Microsoft TrueType Font Assistant way back in 1995. To be honest, I don’t know if this program even exists anymore. But there is a way to look up characters on your PC (Win 95/98, maybe others). Just select Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools and click Character Map. This lets you preview all the special characters for any given font. If you click any character, a little window will tell you the what numbers to press to create it.

You can also use Word to "insert" a symbol. In any Word document simply click Insert, then Symbol and choose the symbol from the chart. You can preview symbols in any font installed on your computer. Fonts such as WingDings and Symbol have the most symbol characters. The chart will also tell you the shortcut code for the symbol if you want to type it.

Here are some commonly used symbols and how to type them:

Character	Regular document Turn on Caps Lock, hold down ALT key:	HTML type into source code
‘	ALT 0145	‘
’	ALT 0146	’
“	ALT 0147	“
”	ALT 0148	”
• (bullet)	ALT 0149	•
– (en dash)	ALT 0150	–
— (em dash)	ALT 0151	—
… (ellipsis)	ALT 0133	…
©	ALT 0169	©
™	ALT 0153	™
®	ALT 0174	®
° (degrees)	ALT 0176	°
½	ALT 0189	½

Need Symbol Characters on Your Web Pages?
The web is the main place where symbols are abused (or just ignored). Very rarely will you see real quotation marks, becasue they are a pain in the #@*. Instead of using a dash (—) to indicate a pause, programmers will stick in a hyphen. This can make your text very confusing to your readers and it looks pretty dumb, too.

Confusing: “Though they were close in age-separated by only a few months-the children were very different.”

Clear: “Though they were close in age – separated by only a few months – the children were very different.”

Don’t let people tell you that you can’t use symbol characters on your web pages, because you can! In fact, many of the same number combinations that work in a word processor can also be used to create symbols on web pages. Your web editing software may not preview the symbols correctly (mine doesn’t), but they will look fine in your web browser. GoLive 5.0 actually complicates the matter, by trying to insert new-fangled special characters automatically. These weird characters work in IE Explorer, but not in Netscape (eegads!). As a result you will probably find both straight and curly quotes on this web site!

Example: on a word processor you would type Alt 0189 to create the character ½. On a web page, you may be able to type the same Alt 0189 directly into the text in layout view. If not, you can go to the HTML source code and type ½ (same numbers, but preceded by &# and followed by ;) to create the same symbol.

Many other symbol characters can be created using the same method. Just be sure not to disturb the rest of the surrounding HTML code.

Note: If you type the keyboard characters (such as ALT 0146) directly in the web page layout window, the symbol may appear correctly in your web design software, but not in the browser (or vice versa). To be safe, test your results in a browser. Also, do not try to use special characters in HTML that rely on a specfic font, such as Wingdings. These characters will not appear in other people’s browsers unless they happen to have your font installed on their system.