About TypeThisOrThat

A reference for typing characters your keyboard doesn’t have — built around one rule: every code published here has to actually work.

Why this site exists

Search for how to type almost any symbol and you’ll find a page that gives you a number. Type that number and, often enough, you get the wrong character or nothing at all.

There are three common reasons, and none of them are obvious if you’re just trying to finish a document.

The leading zero gets dropped. Alt+0169 gives © and Alt+169 gives ®. One digit apart, different characters, and most pages don’t mention which they mean.
The code point gets confused with the Alt code. The euro is U+20AC in Unicode and Alt+0128 on a Windows keyboard. These are unrelated numbering systems, but plenty of pages print one and call it the other.
A code is given where none exists. Alt codes cover a character table designed in the 1980s. Most characters added to Unicode since then have no Alt code whatsoever — but sites publish a plausible-looking number anyway, because an honest “there isn’t one” feels like a worse answer.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Of the 2,197 characters catalogued here, only 150 have a genuine Windows Alt code. Anywhere claiming otherwise is guessing.

How the codes are checked

The codes on this site aren’t typed by hand. They’re generated directly from the Unicode character database, which means a typo in one guide can’t happen — the value either comes from the source or it isn’t published.

Unicode code points and names come straight from the official character database. Every character’s name here is its real name, not a description someone wrote.
Windows Alt codes are looked up in the Windows-1252 table rather than derived from the code point — the two are unrelated, and treating them as the same thing is exactly the error that produces codes that don’t work.
HTML entities are checked against the named-entity list; where no name exists, the numeric form is given instead of inventing one.
Mac shortcuts are the one thing that can’t be generated, since no complete public mapping exists. They’re checked individually. Where a character has no standard shortcut, the site says so and points to Character Viewer rather than making one up.

Before anything is published it runs through an automated check that compares the codes in the article against the same source data. A guide with a code that doesn’t match doesn’t go live.

You can verify any of it yourself against the official Unicode charts, which is the primary source everything here is built on.

What’s here

Written guides for individual characters, each covering Windows, Mac, Word, Excel, Google Docs, iPhone, Android, Chromebook, and the apps people actually work in — Notion, Slack, Discord and Canva.
The symbol library — every character on the site in one searchable grid, sorted into 30 categories.
The Alt code finder — paste a character, a number, a code point or a name and get every other form of it back.
The accent keyboard — accented letters for sixteen languages, with a box for building a whole word before you copy it.

The tools are free, need no account, and don’t store anything you type. Clicking a symbol copies it using your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

Who’s behind it

My name is Saif. I work in digital marketing and I build reference sites — the kind people land on from a search, get an answer from, and leave. That means I spend a lot of time looking at what makes a page genuinely useful rather than merely present.

This one started as a straightforward project and turned into something more stubborn. Building it meant checking every code against the Unicode database instead of copying them from existing pages, and once I started doing that the scale of the problem became obvious: a great deal of what’s published about typing symbols is simply wrong. Codes with the leading zero missing. Unicode numbers presented as keyboard shortcuts. Alt codes confidently listed for characters that have never had one.

None of that is malicious. It’s what happens when pages get written by copying the page above them in the results. But it means someone trying to type a character in a hurry gets a number that doesn’t work, and has no way of knowing why.

So the whole site is built the other way round: the data comes first, generated from the source, and the writing is checked against it before anything is published. It’s a slower way to build a reference site. It’s the only way to build one that’s right.

If something here helps, I’m glad. If something here is wrong, I want to hear about it — the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.

Found something wrong?

Tell me. A reference site that’s wrong is worse than no reference site, and I’d rather fix it than not know.

Particularly useful: a shortcut that doesn’t work on your keyboard layout, a character that won’t render on your device, or a method that’s changed in a recent version of Word, macOS or Windows. Software moves and guides go stale — outside reports are the fastest way to catch it.

Use the contact page and mention which guide and which method, and I’ll check it against the source data.

A note on what this site won’t do

Three things, stated plainly, because they’re the shortcuts most sites in this space take.

No invented codes. Where a character has no Alt code or no Mac shortcut, the guide says so and gives you a route that works. That’s a less satisfying answer than a number, and it’s the correct one.
No padding the count. The symbol library doesn’t include the plain alphabet or the digits to inflate its total. Every character in it is something you might genuinely need to look up.
No dressing up a guess as a fact. Where something depends on your keyboard layout, your region or your software version, the guide says so rather than pretending there’s one answer.