Type Special Characters with a Chromebook (Accents, Symbols, Em Dashes)

I work part-time as an editor, which means I spend a lot of my time replacing hyphens with em dashes. So, when I bought my Chromebook, my life became a little different.

The normal way I’ve always typed em dashes is to press alt and type 0151 on the numerical keypad. Only thing is that Chromebooks don’t have numerical keypads. In fact, most laptops don’t anymore.

In a pinch, you can google the special character and copy and paste the special characters in. But no one’s got time for that.

In Word, you can use special characters from the Insert ribbon.

But Chromebooks don’t have Word.

You get the idea. For those of you who’ve skimmed all this and are just looking for the solution, here it is:

How to Type Special Characters with a Chromebook: Unicode Input

On a Chromebook, when you press CTRL+SHIFT+U in an input field, you’ll get a little underlined “u” on your screen. Look:

Now, type in the unicode entry for the special character you want. An em dash is “2014.”

Hit enter and voila, em dash: —

2014 for an em dash is easy to remember, because 2014 is the year that St. Vincent released her self-titled album St. Vincent. But for all other unicode characters, you should check out this handy reference:

Unicode-Table.com

Wikipedia also has a good break down of all the unicode characters.

That table is massive, of course. So here’s a handy reference for the ones you’d most frequently use on your Chromebook.

Typing Subscript and Superscript in Unicode

The unicode entries for subscript are U+208X, where X is the number you want in subscript. For example, H₂0 uses CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 2082.

The unicode entries for superscript are CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 207x, where X is the number you want in superscript. For example, 10⁷ uses CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 2077.

That is, except for 1, 2, and 3, which are CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 00B9, CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 00B2 and CTRL+SHIFT+U and then 00B3 respectively.

Typing Punctuation in Unicode

Use the handy table below for your dashes and other esoteric punctuation.

Typing Symbols in Unicode

Typing Accents in Unicode