Using the in-built utilities Charmap and Eudcedit, Windows allows you to insert Unicode and special characters in Notepad and your other documents. But the process is not easy and takes a bit of time.

You can add special characters on a PC or Mac computer by using keyboard shortcuts or accessing a pop-up window.

Unicode is a massive, sprawling effort that pairs a number to every unique character in a language, every punctuation mark, every math symbol, and much more. And nearly all of it is available within ...