About this page
The characters a keyboard hides: the dashes, the curly quotes, the spaces of every width, the Turkish letters and the marks of mathematics. Click any of them and it is on your clipboard, ready to paste into a draft, a message or a filename. The page keeps your last few marks at the top, ready for the next visit.
Questions
How do I type an em dash on my own keyboard?
On a Mac, Shift-Option-hyphen (Option-hyphen gives the en dash). On Windows, hold Alt and type 0151 on the numeric keypad, or press Win-period for the emoji-and-symbols panel. Many phone keyboards hide the dashes under a long press on the hyphen. Or skip the shortcuts and copy it from this page.
What is the difference between an em dash and an en dash?
The em dash (—) is the wide one, used to set off a phrase—like this—or mark a break in thought. The en dash (–) is narrower and joins ranges and pairings: 1914–1918, the İstanbul–Ankara train. The hyphen (-) is shorter still and only joins words.
What are curly quotes?
The typographer’s quotation marks—“ ” and ‘ ’—which curl toward the text they enclose, unlike the straight marks (" ') on a keyboard. Books and careful prose use the curly set; word processors usually substitute them automatically, plain text fields usually don’t.
What are the low quotes for, and which mark closes them?
The low double („) and low single (‚) sit on the baseline and open a quotation in German, Polish and Hungarian, where the pair runs „like this“ or „like this” depending on the language. Their mirrored partners are the reversed marks (‟ and ‛), the same commas turned the other way, used as opening quotes in older English and Central European setting. Both pairs are here now, next to the ordinary curly four.
Where does my clipboard data go?
Nowhere. Clicking a character only writes it to your device’s clipboard, right in the browser—the page reads nothing back, sends nothing anywhere, and keeps only your handful of recently copied marks in this browser’s local storage.
More instruments: a text cleaner, a blank page to write on and a blank page to draw on—or see all of them.