Using Windows Character Map Advanced Features

By Jacci Howard Bear, About.com Guide

1. In the Search for field type a name or part of a character name. The more you put in the field, the more restrictive the search.

   A search for "em" will bring up em dash and em space but also Semicolon and Feminine Ordinal Indicator. "Acute" will bring up all characters with an acute accent mark but "capital acute" brings up only the capital letters with an acute. Try different name variations if the results are too long to scroll through.

2. To clear the search and do a new search you have to hit the Reset button.

Character name search is useful for finding spaces. It may miss a few space-like characters but the most common ones such as en space and em space and a thin space will show up if you do a search on "space." You'll have to hover over the blank box to see if that space character is actually there (if there's no hint box pop-up or you can't click on the blank box then that character isn't included in the font you're searching).

1. Basic vs. Advanced View
2. Select and Copy with Tips
3. Character Sets
4. Search by Unicode
5. This page Search by Name
6. Group by Sub-sets
7. Group by Unicode Subranges
8. Drawing & Dingbat Characters
9. Currency & Numbers
10. Punctuation Characters
11. Technical Symbols & Math
12. Private Use Characters