Using the keyboard for special characters

This is to make my life easier; maybe it will help occasional others. There are some comprehensive tables available out there covering the full range of special characters,† but these are the ones I’m always asked about by web content editors when their browsers retch up freakout boxes. This is also comes up when working with text in Photoshop, and writing in text input fields on Delicious and Twitter, hence the OS-based keystroke combinations.

Using the keyboard to produce certain special characters

Character | Mac keystrokes | Windows keystrokes | HTML name and number references
Left single quotation mark (‘) | option + ] | alt + 0145 | &lsquo; | &#8216;
Right single quotation mark (’) | option + shift + ] | alt + 0146 | &rsquo; | &#8217;
Left double quotation mark (“) | option + [ | alt + 0147 | &ldquo; | &#8220;
Right double quotation mark (”) | option + shift + [ | alt + 0148 | &rdquo; | &#8221;
En dash (–) | option + hyphen | alt + 0150 | &ndash; | &#8211;
Em dash (—) | option + shift + hyphen | alt + 0151 | &mdash; | &#8212;
Lowercase a with acute accent (á) | (option + e) + a | alt + 0225 | &aacute; | &#225;
Lowercase e with acute accent (é) | (option + e) + e | alt + 0233 | &eacute; | &#223;
Lowercase e with grave accent (è) | (option + `) + e | alt + 0232 | &egrave; | &#232;
Lowercase u with umlaut (ü) | (option + u) + u | alt + 0252 | &uuml; | &#220;

† See for example the W3C’s Character entity references in HTML 4, this multiplatform table of keyboard shortcuts for special characters, this comparison of Mac OS X and Windows XP keyboard functions, and this table of Windows alt code references (PDF file).

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