Character Map

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Character Map A component of Microsoft Windows

Character Map is a utility included with Microsoft Windows operating systems and is used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input (Alt code) is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard in lieu of typing them. The tool is usually useful for entering special characters.

The Advanced view check box can be used to inspect the character sets in a font according to different encodings (code pages), including Unicode code ranges, to locate particular characters by their Unicode code point and to search for characters by their Unicode name. For Unicode fonts, the characters can be grouped by their Unicode subrange. Although the Unicode standard already extends character field to plane 16 and many fonts e.g. MingLiU-ExtB begin to support higher ranges, this tool still only supports code points on plane 0 (between U+0000 and U+FFFF). Additionally, it does not display certain characters in that range though for reasons unexplained.

The Character Map application can be started by:

Start → Run → charmap.exe

See also

• Private Character Editor

External links

• Character Map Utility Windows XP and Vista
• Using special characters (Character Map): frequently asked questions

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