Help talk:Special characters

How is this so hard

Its 2024, and its still impossible to easily show all characters on Wikipedia. Can you just make an "install this and it will work" package or something. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.7.0.114 (talk) 02:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Confusing and unhelpful

'Default character encoding' box? Oh, Unicode where art thou?

... nobody here but us boxes

The section "Displaying special characters" does not help me get the characters in Alchemical symbol to display in Firefox 31.0. All I see are rectangular boxes with hexadecimal codes inside. Furthermore, the Opera browser version 12.17 only displays blank rectangular boxes. More is needed to get these special characters to display for ordinary readers, maybe a single browser extension or a straightforward single-click script? This help page raises more questions: Exactly what steps must the user follow? Will any one of the fonts listed after "Please download and install one of these freely licensed fonts" suffice for all wikipedia pages?

Also, the instructions are confused as to their target audience: one paragraph appears aimed at the reader while the next is clearly addressing the editor. These paragraphs need to be in clearly seperate sections.

One specific problem (for now) is the instructions do not match what Firefox 31.0 presents, see the thumbnail on the right.

Other problems could be fixed with copy editing by someone who knows the correct procedure, for example, what precisely does "after the previously mentioned steps were followed," refer to? I could go on, but I hope any reader will get my point. -84user (talk) 18:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC) (added what I and Foxit see -84user (talk) 18:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC))

Says it all. Nothing appears to have improved over the years. 14.202.240.20 (talk) 22:37, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

What to do to use a special character

I have need to use a combining acute accent and a combining dieresis (two superscript dots, in Spanish used over theu), in the article tilde. In this help page I cannot find how to do it or even where to go to to find out how to do it. The page on "Inserting Special Characters" does not help. There are lots of interesting characters in the Insert menus at the bottom of my edit screens on WP, but not those. I am using the Safari browser on IOS 9.1. I imagine I have to type in something like { {Unicode|some hex number}}, but I don't know what. deisenbe (talk) 10:33, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Sometimes, if I don't want to look up the hex code, I'll use HTML entities, like á or Ü which render as á or Ü (First, an ampersand, then a vowel or sometimes another letter, in upper or lower case, followed by the combining accent name [dieresis is called "uml" in these], ending with a semicolon.) Someone eventually comes along and converts it to the proper character. —PC-XT+ 05:18, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Is CSS class "Unicode" still supported?

It seems that there is no longer a CSS class "Unicode" supplied in Wikipedia CSS files. It is mentioned in section Displaying special characters. —⁠andrybak (talk) 23:18, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

This CSS class was removed from MediaWiki:Common.css in 2013. I dropped the misleading paragraph: Special:Diff/1236223815. —⁠andrybak (talk) 15:02, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Problem displaying Old Hungarian script on mobile

I am using version 78.0.3904.108 of the Chrome mobile app on a Samsung phone running Android version 9. The app displays the Unicode characters for the Old Hungarian script on its page as those improper-display boxes. I cannot find a section on Android in this help article, and I see no option for fonts in the Chrome settings in the app.146.7.4.77 (talk) 21:36, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Dead links

List of Ancient fonts for Windows users contains mostly dead links. Is there any help to be had in this regard? 109.174.113.221 (talk) 09:22, 19 January 2023 (UTC)