ACCESSING EXTRAS: WINDOWS CHARACTER MAP (PC)

Operating system: PC

Date tested: 25 November 2024 / Missy Meyer

Cost: Free (pre-installed on Windows systems)

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, single stroke or double stroke

How to Access Glyphs in Windows Character Map

First, make sure that the font is installed on your computer or device. Check the “Install fonts on [operating system]” guides for more information.

Windows Character Map is not a design program; it’s a supplemental program that lets you choose alternates, ligatures, and other extra characters that may not be easily accessible through your design program. If your design program has built-in access to those extras, you’ll most likely want to use that method.

From your start menu, type in “character map” or “charmap.” Either one will give you Character Map as your best match. Either click on “Open” on the right side of this panel, or you can double-click on the program name on the left side of the panel to launch the program.

Select the font you’re working with in the top “Font” drop-down menu. In this case, we’ll be working with Spicy Sketcher 2, the double-stroke version of Spicy Sketcher.

Be aware, this is as big as Character Map gets. There’s no way to make it larger, or to make the grid of characters larger.

Once you have your font selected, check the box next to “Advanced view” near the bottom if it isn’t already checked.

Select “Unicode” in the “Character set” drop-down menu.

Select “Unicode Subrange” in the “Group by” drop-down menu.

You’ll get an additional small pop-up; scroll all the way to the bottom to select the “Private Use Characters” set. This is almost always where a font designer will place their specialty characters like alternates, ligatures, dingbats, catchwords, and any extras.

Here you can see the grid of alternates and ligatures in Spicy Sketcher. Yes, they’re very hard to see, because they’re made of such fine lines, and this grid is SO. DARN. SMALL. If you click on a character, it does show you a slightly larger pop-out preview, such as this RR ligature.

If you double-click on the character you want, it will appear down in the “Characters to copy” area. Once you’ve populated that area with the character you want, click on the “Copy” button to copy it to your clipboard.

From there, go back to your design program and paste in the character where you want it to go. In this example, I’m putting that RR ligature into the word TERROR.

Depending on the program you’re using, you may see the character immediately, or you may see an empty spot where it should be, like what you’re seeing above. (This example above is in Affinity Photo.)

If the character isn’t showing, odds are that it either needs to have a stroke applied, or it’s pasted in very small. Or sometimes both of those things! Here you can see that I’ve selected the character and added a stroke, and it now shows up very tiny. I just need to resize that character to be the same size as the rest of the letters.

(Why did this happen? For some reason, Affinity Photo likes to paste in text in its default size and style. My default size is something like 12 point, and the style does not have a stroke applied to it. So even though I’m pasting this in the middle of a bunch of letters that are styled in a different way, it’s choosing to paste in its default way. Oh well! [shrug] )

Once the stroke is applied and the size is the same as everything else, you’re good to go!

If this program has been updated since this test and this guide no longer works, please drop me a line at the contact form so I can update this page!