Inserting special characters

There are 3 ways to insert in an XML document characters other than letters, digits and common punctuation signs:

  1. Directly type the special character (if this is possible) or copy it from a third-party application (such as Windows Character Map utility), then paste it in the XML document.

    Note that the non-breaking space (Unicode code point: U+00A0; corresponds to well-known character entity  ), which is very commonly used, comes with its own keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-Space. Also notice that XMLmind XML Editor represents the non-breaking space as a small dot a little above the baseline of a text line. That is, this character has been made visible.

    The non-breaking space characters is visible
  2. Click on the character displayed in a character palette of the Characters tool.

    Because searching the same characters over and over in the Characters tool can be a daunting task, this tool has a Favorites palette. In order to add a character to the Favorites palette, right-click on it and then select item "Add to Favorites" in the popup menu.

    The Characters tool
  3. Type Esc n (that is, press Esc then press n; n like name) to display this dialog box:
    Insert a character by its name

    Then type the name of a well-known character entity (mdash, rarr, etc). The text field of this dialog box supports auto-completion, therefore suffice to type the first few characters of the entity name.

    The command invoked by the above dialog box inserts the character having specified name. It does not insert a character entity. (XMLmind XML Editor offers no way to work with entities.)

    After inserting a character using the above dialog box, it's possible to insert it elsewhere simply by pressing Ctrl-A (that is, Repeat menu item Edit→Repeat). Ctrl-A (A like Again) allows to repeat the last “repeatable command”. Most commands which require the user to type something or to select an item from a list have been made repeatable.

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