Help talk:Special characters

message: Its 2024, and its still impossible to easily show all characters on Wikipedia. Can you just make an "install this and it will work" package or something. Thanks.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.7.0.114 (talk) 02:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: How is this so hard

message: "This relatively common browser translates to mac-roman for the edit box with the result it munges most Unicode stuff (usually but not always by replacing them with a question mark). It also munges things that are in ISO-8859-1 but not mac-roman (specifically ¤ ¦ ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ Ð × Ý Þ ð ý þ and the soft hyphen) so the problems it causes are not limited to Unicode wikis (though they tend to be much worse on Unicode wikis because they affect actual text and interwiki links rather than just fairly obscure symbols)."
Could we possibly reword this? 72.21.196.66 (talk) 13:59, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have just done so. The thing that struck me was the "relatively common", which for a browser they stopped making seven years ago was plainly incorrect, but while there I cleaned it up. I don't know if anything else needs adding - a note that it and Netscape 4 are pretty historical browsers might be in order.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 20:11, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: IE for the Mac

message: The link under Shavian font doesn't link to a Shavian font. --70.29.63.230 (talk) 20:01, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shavian 

message: It would be great if Wikipedia could detect if the characters on a page are supported by the client's installed font, and use webfonts otherwise. Or SVG/PNG images for old browsers. Checking for font support can be done via measuring a chunk of rendered text in Javascript. The webfont needn't be big, it could be an extract from a comprehensive Unicode font that covers only the block(s) used in the article. I guess the great majority of articles with non-Latin characters doesn't use more than one non-Latin Unicode block.--94.223.167.143 (talk) 21:34, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Webfonts 

message: I have proposed a different ordering for the Greek polytonic characters in the insert box below the edit box on the talk page of WikiProject Greece.  --Lambiam 18:54, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Order of polytonic characters 

message: What do Mac users do, pray tell?  Batshua (talk) 10:01, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Displaying special characters

message: As a result of the discussion above, this article was updated to direct the reader interested only in entering special characters to the new Help:Entering special characters. Additional changes included moving the section on Unicode and ISO 8859 from the beginning of the article to after the sections dealing with the practical tasks of entering and displaying the characters, and changing the typeface of literal text to monospace (or in some cases, graphical representations of keys) to make it more obvious what a user must actually type into the edit window. JeffConrad (talk) 02:39, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit of 6 April 2011 

message: I'm using Chrome, and I don't see anything about it in your page. I have some characters showing up as squares, so if you could address please?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.16.247.90 (talk) 17:26, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm using Chromium on Mac... characters rendering as squares... help please! :D  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.228.92.213 (talk) 05:47, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chrome 

message: For years certain tennis articles have used dagger by just placing the symbol in the html like this, †. Now someone is changing it to , using the { brackets. It seemed just fine before but is there an actual policy on what is correct or are both acceptable? To me it seems like the brackets add a whole lot more unnecessary coding. Fyunck(click) (talk) 19:07, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: daggers

message: I just tried to download Cardo.  I have Kaspersky Internet Security and it wouldn't let me access the Cardo page because it said it contains a Trojan.  Just thought I'd mention it.
Ninanta (talk) 23:22, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible problem with Cardo - may contain a trojan 

message: no mention of android?--85.76.171.31 (talk) 05:30, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: what is there to mention? Unicode text input mostly isn't specific to Wikipedia, it should be on Wikiversity or similar. --Ysangkok (talk) 21:26, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: As the last unhelpful detailed response is now 10 years old, it's time for a more helpful specific response. Android use is now much more common, especially on mobile phones, which can often be the only way (although tablets also) used to access WP as well as other systems. Probably iPhones too, but not specifically my problem. 14.202.240.20 (talk) 22:32, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  android 

message: I need to write a caret notation in italic.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8422:1191:6E00:56E6:FCFF:FEDB:2BBA (talk) 20:23, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  formating question 

message: OK, this is probably the wrong place to ask, but I couldn't find anywhere that seemed better. There seems to be problem with the italicisation of Arabic script in en-wiki. In ar-wiki, italics are used, as here, for book titles. There, the upper part of an italic character slopes forwards, just as in Roman script. Arabic is written from right to left, so the characters point towards, say, 11 o'clock, just as Roman italics point towards 1 o'clock or so. But in this wiki, Arabic italics have the same slope as Roman, and thus lean backwards in relation to the direction of writing or reading. Is this a browser problem, or something at a more fundamental level? As an example, the references here are apparently copied from those here, but display differently (to me). Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:08, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: You might be better of posting to the Technical Village Pump, i.e. WP:VPT. It sounds like something more fundamental, which may or may not be easily fixable. Otherwise it might need a style guideline not to use italics, such as exists for Chinese, as Chinese doesn't look right when italicised.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 19:23, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italicisation of Arabic script 

message: "If the console character set is UTF-8 then these browsers are Unicode safe but if it isn't they aren't.". I don't even think the section on text browsers is relevant, is anyone even using text browsers on non-Unicode terminals anymore? I don't think it's worth mentioning. --Ysangkok (talk) 21:20, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  UTF-16 implied not "Unicode-safe" 

message: The section "Displaying special characters" does not help me get the characters in Alchemical symbol to display in Firefox 31.0. All I see are rectangular boxes with hexadecimal codes inside. Furthermore, the Opera browser version 12.17 only displays blank rectangular boxes. More is needed to get these special characters to display for ordinary readers, maybe a single browser extension or a straightforward single-click script? This help page raises more questions: Exactly what steps must the user follow? Will any one of the fonts listed after "Please download and install one of these freely licensed fonts" suffice for all wikipedia pages?
Also, the instructions are confused as to their target audience: one paragraph appears aimed at the reader while the next is clearly addressing the editor. These paragraphs need to be in clearly seperate sections.
One specific problem (for now) is the instructions do not match what Firefox 31.0 presents, see the thumbnail on the right.
Other problems could be fixed with copy editing by someone who knows the correct procedure, for example, what precisely does  "after the previously mentioned steps were followed," refer to? I could go on, but I hope any reader will get my point. -84user (talk) 18:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Says it all. Nothing appears to have improved over the years. 14.202.240.20 (talk) 22:37, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing and unhelpful 

message: I have need to use a combining acute accent and a combining dieresis (two superscript dots, in Spanish used over theu), in the article tilde. In this help page I cannot find how to do it or even where to go to to find out how to do it. The page on "Inserting Special Characters" does not help. There are lots of interesting characters in the Insert menus at the bottom of my edit screens on WP, but not those. I am using the Safari browser on IOS 9.1. I imagine I have to type in something like { {Unicode|some hex number}}, but I don't know what. deisenbe (talk) 10:33, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Sometimes, if I don't want to look up the hex code, I'll use HTML entities, like á or Ü which render as á or Ü (First, an ampersand, then a vowel or sometimes another letter, in upper or lower case, followed by the combining accent name [dieresis is called "uml" in these], ending with a semicolon.) Someone eventually comes along and converts it to the proper character. —PC-XT+ 05:18, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  What to do to use a special character 

message: It seems that there is no longer a CSS class "Unicode" supplied in Wikipedia CSS files. It is mentioned in section Displaying special characters. —⁠andrybak (talk) 23:18, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is CSS class "Unicode" still supported? 

message: I am using version 78.0.3904.108 of the Chrome mobile app on a Samsung phone running Android version 9. The app displays the Unicode characters for the Old Hungarian script on its page as those improper-display boxes. I cannot find a section on Android in this help article, and I see no option for fonts in the Chrome settings in the app.146.7.4.77 (talk) 21:36, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problem displaying Old Hungarian script on mobile 

message: List of Ancient fonts for Windows users contains mostly dead links. Is there any help to be had in this regard? 109.174.113.221 (talk) 09:22, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead links