Punctuation Alt Codes

Dashes, quotation marks, the ellipsis, dagger, pilcrow and section sign, each with its Alt code, Mac shortcut and HTML entity.

This group holds 41 characters. They are scattered from U+0021 to U+2042, 8,226 codepoints apart, because they were added to Unicode at different times and for different reasons. They are drawn from Basic Latin (19), General Punctuation (16), Latin-1 Supplement (6) in the Unicode Standard, which is what decides how each one is encoded and how software sorts and compares it.

Most of the traffic to this group is for •, · and –. The phrase people type for the first of those is bullet point copy and paste, which is worth knowing if you are looking for it under another name.

Most of them, 19 of the 41, come from Basic Latin: the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. A block is an address rather than a category, and this group is drawn from 3 of them. The rest come from General Punctuation and Latin-1 Supplement.

35 of the 41 have a Windows Alt code that works as printed. The rest are copy and paste, which works the same everywhere.

Of the 41, 15 have a Mac shortcut of their own, and 2 can be written in HTML by name rather than by number. Everything else in this drawer is reached by copying it or by its codepoint, which works in every application on every system.

1 have a compatibility decomposition, which means NFKC normalisation rewrites it into something plainer and a search box may not return what was pasted into it.

Every character below copies with one click. Each one also has a guide page with its Windows, Mac and HTML route written out.

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