VisualEditor/Special characters/en

The special characters tool in VisualEditor makes it easy for users to insert special characters, even if the characters are not present on the users' keyboards.

VisualEditor shares the list of special characters with WikiEditor, the default wikitext editor. This list is shared between all wikis, and you do not need to do anything to enable it on your wiki.

To access it, press the special character button (Ω) to open the tray of characters: Click on one of the displayed characters to insert it. Click the special character button again to close it.

Adding often used characters
VisualEditor also lets each wiki's community specify a list of often used characters which will show at the top of the page. This lets you make it easy for editors in languages where they will not normally have the whole of their alphabet on their keyboard, or for them to use particular characters that your wiki encourages but that aren't on their keyboards. It looks like this: To set this up for your wiki, you need create the page. This is a JSON page specifying which characters you wish to show and their order. Only  (administrator) users are normally able to create or edit this page, as it is part of the interface. To get an idea of what is possible or useful, you can look at the English Wikipedia's list.

Help and troubleshooting

 * If the system does not let you save, check for missing or extra commas using a tool like http://jsonlint.com. If the JSON formatting is not perfect, you will not be able to save your changes to the message.
 * Please request further help at VisualEditor/Feedback.