Tech for Luddites

From posting your résumé on your website to displaying product prices for European customers in € to writing a blog post celebrating National Π Day, there are lots of times when you want to use a special character on the page. Fortunately, WordPress makes it really easy to add some of the most popular ones.

Unfortunately, they also make this feature a little hard to find…

You need to first make sure you’re using the Visual tab to write your post or page. By default, the main text entry field has a row of buttons at the top for common functions like bold, alignment and spellcheck.

What a lot of people don’t know is that by clicking the last button on that row, called Show/Hide Kitchen Sink, you’ll open a second row of buttons for some other great features like applying heading styles, pasting text as plain text and, yes, inserting special characters.

When you click the Insert Custom Character button, a dialog box will pop up that provides buttons for 200 different characters. When you roll over one, you’ll see more information at right about the character including a larger version, its name and the HTML and number codes for each.

Simply click the character you want and it will insert it into your text where your cursor is and close the box.

Tip: If you want to use a special character in your page title, use the steps above to enter it in the text box then copy and paste it into the title box.