Character map

As you write, characters the keyboard does not have keep coming up. The ellipsis at the end of a line of dialogue, the dash that breaks up narration, the white corner brackets around a work’s title. The character map finds that character and places it right at the cursor. Press the Character map button on the toolbar above the body, or Ctrl + F10 (Cmd + F10 on Mac), and it opens. Pressing it while an IME is composing does not lose the character you were typing.

Choose a category on the left and press a character in the grid on the right.

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Browsing by category

The list on the left starts with Recently used and goes on to Punctuation, Quotes & brackets, Currency, Math & measures, Arrows, Greek, Latin extensions, Hangul jamo, and Symbols. Below those come categories like CJK Ideographs, Hiragana, and Emoji. For a novel or a screenplay the first two categories cover almost everything. Punctuation holds three kinds of ellipsis (…, ⋯, ‥). … is drawn at mid-height only in CJK fonts, so ⋯, which sits in the middle everywhere, is included alongside it. The dashes (—, –), the middle dot (·), and the reference mark (※) are in this category too. Quotes & brackets gathers 「」, 『』, and 《》, so quotations and work titles are handled in one place.

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Searching by name

The search field reads “Search characters”. Type what a character is called — corner bracket, dash, infinity — and it comes up. You can also paste in a character you copied, or find it by a code value like U+22EF. Search covers named characters only. Categories built from code ranges, like the CJK ideographs and emoji, do not come up in search, so pick those from the list. When no character matches, it tells you “No characters match” along with what you typed. Press Escape once to clear the query, and once more to close the window.

Type what a character is called and the grid narrows straight away.

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Inserting, and pulling it out again

Press a character and it goes in at the cursor, with a notice reading “Inserted” and the character. Pressing with the mouse leaves the window open, so you can put several in a row. Move with the arrow keys and insert with Enter, and the window closes and you are back in the body. Characters you insert stack up in Recently used, to 60 of them. Open the window next time and it comes up in the Recently used category with the first character focused. For the ellipsis you always use, opening the window and pressing Enter is enough. When the history is empty the cursor goes to the search field. Clear a character you no longer need out of Recently used with the X that appears on hover, or with Backspace.