My favourite glyphs

I love rich, nuanced typography.

This a list of my favourite non-standard glyphs. I find myself using those a lot — to the point many of those keyboard shortcuts below reside in my muscle memory.

I want Medium to give writers (and readers) unparalleled world-class typography without requiring them to choose between obscure options, memorize keyboard shortcuts, or know much about typography to begin with. (We are already incredibly clever about not allowing two spaces after a full stop; we give people beautifully kerned em dashes; we convert three dots to a proper ellipsis mark; we know differences between primes and quotes.)

Some of the glyphs I list below are pretentiously obscure, but the others rather common. Tell me more about the ones you love, or hold Alt or Shift–Alt and go through all the keys on your keyboard to discover new ones!

I will be exploring whether it makes sense to add support for more of those on Medium — support in the sense of automatic replacement as you type, and proper glyphs in Freight Text and Bernino (you will see that some glyphs below sadly default to Georgia).

“ ”
double curved quotes whenever I use quotes
Alt–[ and Alt–Shift–[

‘ ’
single curved quotes incl. properly curled apostrophe
Alt–] and Alt–Shift–]

« »
double angled quotes/guillemets that go inside curved quotes if necessary
Alt–\ and Alt–Shift–\

‹ ›
single angled quotes that typically go where < and > used to go (e.g. hierarchy)
Alt–Shift–3 and Alt–Shift–4

·
interpunct is a nice divider, great bullet point, and a nose in my trademark smileys :·)
Alt–Shift–9

•
bullet point that I don’t really use. Get out of here, you stupid fat bullet point. No one invited you.

–
en dash in a lot of places (I prefer the European space+en dash+space rather than American/Medium hair space+em dash+hair space)
Alt–minus

—
em dash when I feel nostalgic/American
Alt–Shift–minus

…
ellipsis as an actual slightly different character than three dots alone
Alt–;

¶
pilcrow when I want to start a new paragraph and I physically can’t. ¶ This would be a good example.

½ ¼ ¾
vulgar fractions as in “check out my rad 3½" floppy drive!”

×
multiplication sign for things like 7.5"×11" or 5× bigger

∞
infinity because it’s beautiful

°
degree sign whenever I talk about temperature or angles

π
pi whenever I talk about pi instead of spelling it out
Alt–P

⁄
solidus for fractions, instead of a slash

‰
per mill sign for 1⁄10th of a per cent

‱
basis point for 1⁄10th of a per mill

€
euro sign instead of spelling out “Euro”

µ
micro sign because I am mistaken in my belief that writing “µmanaging” makes me look cool

№
numero sign because it’s my №1 glyph

™
trademark typically for fun since I’m not Sarah
Alt–2

0̸
slashed zero in situations where 0 (zero) might be confused with O (oh)

⌘
cloverleaf for Mac keyboard shortcuts like ⌘–C.