If you’re like most people, you use the internet to do your shopping, bank transactions and other important tasks. But what if you need to include special characters or coding in an online form? In this article, we’ll show you how to insert special characters and coding in Firefox. First, open Firefox and go to the Tools menu. Select Options. Under the General tab, click on the Formats sub-tab. Here, you’ll see a list of formats that Firefox supports. Select Unicode (UTF-8) from the list and click on the Formats button at the top of the window. Now, under Character set selection, select All characters from the drop-down menu and click on OK. Next, under Encoding type selection, select UTF-8 from the drop-down menu and click on OK again. Finally, under Line breaks type selection, select Use system defaults from the drop-down menu and click on OK once more. Now that your form is formatted correctly for UTF-8 encoding, all you need to do is enter special characters or code in your online form using their corresponding Unicode character codes. For example: ƒ (lowercase “f”), ƒ (uppercase “F”), ¢ (dollar sign), € (euro sign), ® (registered trademark symbol), ® (registered trade mark symbol), ™ (trademark symbol with an asterisk), etc., would be entered as follows: ƒ , ƒ , ¢ , € , ® . ..

Your New Special Text Edit Bar

After installing the extension you will see the new toolbar that has been added to your browser. These are the kinds of text that can be added to online comment areas, forums, or other website areas that allow their use:

Special characters HTML tags BB codes Wiki characters

All that you will need to do is click on the appropriate special character or code to insert it into the website text area.

The first two toolbar items are each singular in their function and insert the following types of text.

A look at the special characters available for your use.

The wiki code menu.

The HTML menu…

And the BB code menu.

Here is a quick sample using the HTML menu…much better than doing it manually. This should definitely help speed things up throughout the day. Our only disappointment during testing was not being able to add additional items (i.e. characters, tags) to the toolbar at this time.

Conclusion

While a new toolbar may not be for everyone this extension can certainly prove useful when you need to quickly add special characters or coding in website text areas.

Links

Download the SKeys extension (Mozilla Add-ons)