: How do I spec a character with no keyboard shortcut? I am working on a corporate standards book for a client. Client works with two design agencies, my office and Other Agency. Both agencies

@Sims5801359

It seems there are indeed keyboard shortcuts which produce these two arrows. But I'm not sure I understand all the issues.

Type:


Ç for the up-arrow

Mac: shift+option+c

PC: alt+0199 on the numpad
È for the down-arrow

Mac: option+`E

PC: alt+0200 on the numpad


How did I find these out? I wanted to check whether the arrows did in fact map to characters within one of the standard (non-Unicode) character sets.

In InDesign, I set a text box's font to Wingdings 3 and inserted the arrows at glyph IDs 169 and 170, then changed the font to Arial. No luck - this gave me two squares.

Just in case, I used the Windows Character Map utility to pick the same arrows from Wingdings 3 instead. Switching the font to Arial here did give me two Latin characters: Ç and È, which when pasted into the InDesign document and switched back to Wingdings displayed the correct arrows.

I then used one of my frequently visited bookmarks, Arnold Winkelried’s special characters tip sheet, to find both Mac and Windows shortcuts; most resources only seem to give one or the other.

Then I tested the Windows shortcuts back in InDesign and asked Lauren to do the same on the Mac.

But I can't work out why the arrows I initially inserted from the InDesign Glyph palette didn't correspond to Ç and È. Can someone advise?

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@Sims5801359

An alternative solution could be to create a new font in which these characters are mapped to keyboard characters. You could put the arrows on say a and b (or maybe even ^ and v to make them easier to remember)

Yes, there's a possible question around copyright/redistribution issues, but they perhaps don't need to be exactly the same as the Wingdings ones you use now.

I once used this to split out Arial's Greek characters into a new font in order to use them in Quark before it had Unicode support, but I had no need to distribute the font to anyone else.

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@Hamm6457569

The Unicode values for these arrows are xf0c7 and xf0c8 respectively, so a completely unambiguous specification would be: Font: Wingdings 3; Unicode 0xf0c7 (up arrow), 0xf0c8 (down arrow).

David Blatner wrote a great post on InDesign Secrets back in 2008, all about inputting arbitrary Unicode values. The post includes a link to a tiny, but handy little script that saves massive amounts of time when you've a project with this kind of awkward frequently-used character. Since you can assign a keyboard shortcut to a script, a few minutes setting up the scripts with a text editor can save hours of production time on the project.

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@Sims5801359

I don't have a Mac, but quoting Wikipedia: Unicode input:


In Mac OS X and in Mac OS 8.5 and
later: one chooses the Unicode Hex
Input keyboard layout. Holding down
the Option key, one then types the
four-digit hex Unicode code point. On
releasing the Option key; the
equivalent character will appear.

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@Vandalay110

I am on Windows, and alt+0169 alt+0170 will give me two arrows using wingdings 3, but they are LEFT and RIGHT arrows, not up and down. In any event, I would probably refer to the ones I wanted as UNICODE (U+00A9) (x00A9 = 169) and (U+00AA) (x00AA = 170).

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