02:46
Faizan
You're on Facebook and you see a friend's status and it has a heart in it. You look at your computer keyboard: there is no heart character there. You don't want to look like a facebook newb, so you don't ask your friend how she made the heart -- but you wondered. However, it's not hard to get special symbols and alternate characters to show up on Facebook if you know some secrets.
Examples
The heart is actually the easy one. Type the "<" character (on most keyboards, it's the Shift of the comma key) immediately followed by the number 3. In the box where you type, they still look like two separate characters, but when they post on Facebook, they magically change to a heart. Other characters are not something you can type from your keyboard; the colon, dash and right parentheis don't make a smiley, for example. But you've probably seen them: Japanese or Chinese characters, letters from the alphabet used for the Russian language, stars, music notes, chess pieces, the four suits from a deck of cards, snowflakes, flowers, a sun, a cloud, an umbrella, a cross or the Star of David.
Copy and Paste
The easy way to get many of these characters is to find a website that shows them, such as fsymbols.com, then copy them and paste them into your Facebook status or other Facebook messages. There are also sites with strings of characters that creative people have put together so they have a decorative look to them; you can paste these and add your own message for an interesting greeting.
Symbol Generators
You can also find websites that have special symbol-generating apps built in. These work like online translators -- you type in what you want to say, click on the button and you get the code. Then you copy the code and paste it into your Facebook message. This is how people type backwards and upside-down, but there are other creative ways to make your text look less plain and boring than the average Facebook status.
Alt Codes
Alt codes have been around since the first person felt limited by the finite number of keys on a computer keyboard. Most fonts have many more characters than the keyboard will display, and you can type the extra characters by holding down the "Alt" key and typing a number code. Find a site such as alt-codes.net/ that shows you the alt keys for your particular operating system, but be warned that in some cases people with other operating systems might not see the characters you intended.
Examples
The heart is actually the easy one. Type the "<" character (on most keyboards, it's the Shift of the comma key) immediately followed by the number 3. In the box where you type, they still look like two separate characters, but when they post on Facebook, they magically change to a heart. Other characters are not something you can type from your keyboard; the colon, dash and right parentheis don't make a smiley, for example. But you've probably seen them: Japanese or Chinese characters, letters from the alphabet used for the Russian language, stars, music notes, chess pieces, the four suits from a deck of cards, snowflakes, flowers, a sun, a cloud, an umbrella, a cross or the Star of David.
Copy and Paste
The easy way to get many of these characters is to find a website that shows them, such as fsymbols.com, then copy them and paste them into your Facebook status or other Facebook messages. There are also sites with strings of characters that creative people have put together so they have a decorative look to them; you can paste these and add your own message for an interesting greeting.
Symbol Generators
You can also find websites that have special symbol-generating apps built in. These work like online translators -- you type in what you want to say, click on the button and you get the code. Then you copy the code and paste it into your Facebook message. This is how people type backwards and upside-down, but there are other creative ways to make your text look less plain and boring than the average Facebook status.
Alt Codes
Alt codes have been around since the first person felt limited by the finite number of keys on a computer keyboard. Most fonts have many more characters than the keyboard will display, and you can type the extra characters by holding down the "Alt" key and typing a number code. Find a site such as alt-codes.net/ that shows you the alt keys for your particular operating system, but be warned that in some cases people with other operating systems might not see the characters you intended.
Posted in: facebook
