When creating articles or documents on-line one of the things that we have to give up is fancy formatting and bullets as these are often changed to an incomprehensible character (or even an upside down question mark). I decided enough was enough and I found a simple solution.

So here it is…

Bullets and fancy characters, like ♫ or ® is simply a matter of putting the right Unicode character into the on-line document. So what is Unicode? Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text.

So how do I add Unicode characters to my text document?

This is where a little used application called Character Map comes in handy. You should be able to find this under Accessories in your start menu. When you start Character Map you should see the following:

At first this look like a very innocuous data set, after all we know how to get the majority of these characters, they are on our keyboard the © or the ® are characters that Microsoft Word will create for us when we type (c) or (r) – but this does not work when using the browser. This is where using the Unicode becomes important.

There are a number of characters that can be advantageous for on-line editing. Take a scroll sown and you will see lots of characters that can be used.

Examples: ۩ – ۞ – Җ – ٭- ‡ – ⌂ – ↔ – ↕ – ♥

One thing that is important to remember is that you MUST use the default character set (Arial) and it is NOT possible to use the fancy graphic fonts like WingDings or WebDings through this method. To obtain characters usable for bullets you will need to scroll a few pages down to a page that looks something like this:

Using the mouse you can click on the desired character that you are looking for, it will become larger, like this:

Character map is merely magnifying the character to make it clearer for you to view. In this case we are looking at a simple bullet, but this makes many of the more complex characters clearer for example Cyrillic or Arabic.

If you click on the “Select” button the character you select will be placed into the “Characters to copy” field as follows:

Simply click on “Copy” to copy it into the computers buffer.

Now go to the on-line document that you are editing and paste the character into the right place. Here is an example of the finished item:

For the majority of on-line documents the bullets will not be able to be indented (this is certainly true with the majority of Social Media profile pages) therefore it is important how we denote things like minor bullets. In this example I elected to use the ♦ symbol for major bullets and the ○ symbol for minor ones. Thus it is possible to clearly denote that these are subsidiary items to the item with the bolder bullet. I have tried various combinations but the combination here seems to work best for me. Remember for any on-line document the reader needs to read the text not be amazed by the bullet, so simplicity sells.

This article is an update of an article that I published here.