Practical Unicode

Windows provides several methods for typing special characters and Unicode symbols, including Alt codes, the Character Map app, keyboard shortcuts, and the emoji picker introduced in Windows 10. This guide explains every method for inserting special characters on Windows with step-by-step instructions and shortcuts.

macOS makes it easy to type special characters and Unicode symbols through the Character Viewer, Option key shortcuts, the emoji and symbols keyboard, and press-and-hold accents. This guide covers all methods for inserting special Unicode characters on a Mac with practical shortcuts and tips.

Linux offers multiple ways to insert Unicode characters, including Ctrl+Shift+U followed by a hex code point, compose key sequences, IBus input methods, and desktop environment character pickers. This guide covers the main methods for typing special Unicode characters on Linux across GNOME, KDE, and terminal environments.

Typing special Unicode characters on smartphones requires different techniques than on desktop — long-pressing keys, using third-party keyboards, or copy-pasting from character reference apps. This guide explains how to access and type special characters on iOS and Android devices.

Mojibake is the garbled text you see when a file encoded in one character set is interpreted as another, producing strings like ’ instead of the apostrophe or ë instead of ë. This guide explains why mojibake happens, how to diagnose the original encoding, and the practical steps to fix garbled text in files, databases, and applications.

Storing Unicode text in a database requires choosing the right charset, collation, and column type — a wrong choice can silently truncate emoji or produce incorrect sort orders. This guide covers Unicode database configuration for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, including the utf8mb4 gotcha in MySQL and how to migrate existing data.

Modern operating systems support Unicode filenames, but different filesystems use different encodings and normalization forms, causing cross-platform file sharing problems especially between macOS (NFD) and Linux (NFC). This guide explains how Unicode filenames work on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and how to safely handle them in Python, shell scripts, and other tools.

Email evolved from ASCII-only systems, and supporting Unicode in email subjects, bodies, and addresses requires encoding schemes like Quoted-Printable, Base64, and the newer Internationalized Email (EAI) standard. This guide explains how Unicode works in email, covering MIME encoding, emoji in subjects, and international email addresses.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) allow domain names to contain non-ASCII characters from any Unicode script, converted to ASCII-compatible encoding using the Punycode algorithm. This guide explains how IDNs work, how Punycode conversion functions, and the security risks posed by homograph attacks on international domain names.

Using Unicode symbols, special characters, and emoji in web content has important accessibility implications for screen readers, which may announce character names in unexpected ways. This guide explains how to use Unicode characters accessibly, including ARIA labels, alt text for emoji, and avoiding symbols that reduce readability.

Unicode supports both left-to-right and right-to-left text through the bidirectional algorithm and explicit directional control characters, enabling correct display of Arabic, Hebrew, and other RTL scripts alongside LTR text. This guide explains text direction in Unicode, how to use the dir attribute in HTML, and common RTL layout mistakes to avoid.

A font file only contains glyphs for a subset of Unicode characters, which means characters outside that subset fall back to other fonts or show as blank boxes, raising complex fallback and design challenges. This guide explains how Unicode font rendering works, how to choose fonts with broad Unicode coverage, and how to use font stacks and Unicode ranges in CSS.

Finding the exact Unicode character you need can be challenging given over 140,000 characters spread across 150+ scripts and dozens of symbol categories. This guide explains the best tools and techniques for finding any Unicode character by visual appearance, name, keyword, or approximate description.

Copying and pasting text between applications can introduce invisible characters, change normalization forms, strip or mangle Unicode characters, and cause subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose. This guide explains what happens to Unicode text during copy-paste operations and the best practices for preserving character integrity across applications.

Unicode's Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block and other areas contain bold, italic, script, Fraktur, monospace, and double-struck variants of Latin letters that can transform ordinary text into stylized versions without any formatting. This guide explains how Unicode fancy text works, which character ranges produce which styles, and the accessibility trade-offs of using them.