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Special, Extended, and Expert Characters
Fonts contain more than just letters and numbers. Designers and other font users need to know how to access special characters, extended characters, and expert characters found in many fonts. Effective use of these special, extended, and expert characters includes the proper and aesthetically pleasing use of ligatures, small caps, old style figures, and accent marks.
Chart of Common Diacriticals
This chart shows what keystrokes to use to type acute, cedilla, circumflex, grave, tilde, and umlaut accented characters.
Create Your Own Inline, Diagonal Fractions
Although you could use an expert character set or math font that contains a wide variety of fractions, you can also create built-up fractions in graphics or page layout software. While the specific commands may differ from one program to the next, follow these general instructions to create your own typographically correct inline or diagonal fractions.
Backward Slash
It has a name and specific usage guidelines. Learn them.
Circled P Copyright Symbol
The sound recording copyright symbol isn't mapped in most standard fonts. You'll either need to find a font that does have the symbol or create your own. Learn more.
Forward Slash
Learn the proper name and usage of a forward slash.
How to Create and Use an Ellipsis
Elliptical periods, more commonly called an ellipsis, indicate the omission of text or an interruption or hesitation. Here's how to create them.
How to Create and Use Copyright Symbols
In addition to proper application of the various copyright symbols and trademark symbols you will often have to finetune them for the best visual appearance. Learn how to type the copyright, trademark, and registered tradmark symbols found in most standard Mac and Windows fonts.
How to Create and Use Dashes and Hyphens
One mark of professionally set type is the proper use of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Each is a different size and has its own proper usage. Learn how to create, modify, and typeset en dashes (–), em dashes (—), and hyphens (-) in desktop publishing.
How to Type Acute Accent Marks
Acute accent marks slant to the right over the top of certain vowels. Acute accent marks are found in words like café.
How to Type Cedilla Accent Marks
Characters with cedilla accent marks have a small tail on the letter C. Cedilla accent marks are found in words like façade.
How to Type Circumflex Accent Marks
Circumflex accent marks look like little roofs over a letter and are found in words like château. In the case of the lower case i, the carets or circumflex accent marks replace the dot on the i.
How to Type Grave Accent Marks
Grave accent marks appear over certain vowels and slant to the left. Words like voilà contain characters with grave accent marks.
How to Type Quotes, Apostrophes, and Primes
Avoid the look of an amateur by properly using typographer’s quotation marks (curly quotes) and apostrophes and primes in your desktop published documents. Learn how to access the curly quotes and proper apostrophes on a Mac or Windows PC.
How to Type Tilde Accent Marks
Tilde accent marks are a small wavy line that appears over certain consonants and vowels. Tilde accent marks are found in words like mañana.
How to Type Umlaut Accent Marks
Umlaut accent marks are two small dots over a letter, and in the case of the lower case i those dots replace the single dot. Umlaut accent marks are found in words like naïve.
How to Use Small Caps
Small caps are uppercase (capital) letters that are about the size of normal lowercase letters in any given typeface. Small caps are less intrusive when all uppercase appears within normal text or can be used for special emphasis.
Typesetting Numbers
How and when to use proportional, tabular, Old Style, and Lining figures.
Typesetting the Space Between Words
Learn how to use en spaces, em spaces, and other special invisible characters.
Using OpenType Extended Characters in Illustrator
Discover how to access and use the extended characters available in OpenType fonts using the OpenType panel in Adobe Illustrator in this illustrated tutorial at About.com Graphics Software.
Accessing Special Characters
Charts and instructions for using accents, ligatures, punctuation symbols, and other special characters. Mac and PC.
Expert Characters for Professional Text
Writing for MacWorld, Kathleen Tinkel covers the use of ligatures, small caps, and more for setting better-looking text.
Ligature Schmigature
Daniel Will-Harris makes a case for not using ligatures.
Ligatures in Latin-based Languages
Scroll down the definition of ligature for a lengthy discussion of some of the history of ligatures and the problems encounted in using them in non-Arabic alphabets (like English).
Logos and Ligatures
In his Logos for the Design Challenged series, Gary Priester experiements with creating your own special ligatures for distinctive logos.
Rules of Typography
Special symbols such as Copyright and Trademark, true ellipsis.
What gets noticed
Daniel Will-Harris outlines specific typographic finetuning that is useful (more so than ligatures) including the use of small caps and old style figures.