Using Special Characters

In your web page design it maybe necessary for some part of your textual information to include special characters, such as the copyright or trademark symbol.

These special characters are referred to as ASCII Characters. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services.

ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many now obsolete)[7] that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, including the space (which is considered an invisible graphic) – Wikipedia ASCII.

Today’s HTML and Blog editors allow you to simply copy the symbol and paste it into your text. Back in the day, you could only add these characters by knowing the special ASCII Code. You can find codes for the Office, Business, Math, Currency, Astrological and Weather symbols and even Chess and Playing Cards.

Coding ASCII Codes
Using an ASCII characters in HTML is easy. You can copy the symbol and paste it, or you can type the ASCII HTML Character code in your source code. When you return to the visual view, it should be there.

You can also find a list of codes at the Unicode Consortium. Specifically, you can go to the Character Name Index and use their search to find a particular symbol, such as “thumbs up” and they’ll show you several results. Look for the pdf files that contain the codes.

Here’s a caveat though; when you are coding the symbol in HTML, you must add a ; semi-colon after the number. Ie:  ♨ gives you hot springs → ♨