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How do I make Unicode texts like the one in the title, or like the following, without resorting to copy+paste?

٩(-̮̮̃-̃)۶ ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶ ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶ ٩(-̮̮̃•̃).

As an aside, note that in your browser the above example should look like:

Expected rendering of Unicode smileys

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  • 3
    why don't you just copy/ paste?
    – joe
    Oct 8, 2009 at 8:45
  • 19
    I want to know how does it come in multiline fashion? take (●̮̮̃•̃) for example. Why do i get a feeling that it is in multiline? Oct 8, 2009 at 8:55
  • 3
    reddit.com/r/unicode Sep 20, 2010 at 9:53
  • 3
    I am :( that these smilies are broked in Chrome. they used to work...
    – kenwarner
    Aug 13, 2011 at 3:19

5 Answers 5

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As for your confusion about multi-line: There are numerous diacritics at work here. Those are combining characters that get placed above or below other characters. If we dissect the specific smiley (●̮̮̃•̃) we get the following:

(   U+0028  Left Parenthesis (this is obvious)

●   U+25CF  Black Circle (this will be the left eye)

 ̮  U+032E  Combining breve below (this gets part of the mouth)
           The fact that it's placed slightly right of the circle is a
           font issue. Normally it should appear directly below the
           preceding character

 ̮  U+032E  Combining breve below (still part of the mouth)

 ̃   U+0303  Combining Tilde (this will be the left eyebrow)

•   U+2022  Bullet (right eye)

 ̃   U+0303  Combining Tilde (eyebrow)

)   U+0029  Right Parenthesis

It's some clever use of diacritic characters that creates the illusion of multiple lines here. Combining characters can be stacked, as seen with the breve, but usually the results are less good.

You can paste the smileys into Word and by placing the cursor after a character and pressing Alt+C you can cause the character to be replaced with its Unicode code point in hexadecimal. In the case of diacritics you first replace the diacritic and then can proceed with the base character (or still more diacritics if they are there). The other way around works too. You can enter 2022 and press Alt+C and get a bullet point.

So for getting the smiley above you can use the following string of letters and numbers:

002825CF032E032E0303202203030029

paste it into Word and hit Alt+C every four places, beginning at the left.

Note: In the preceding paragraphs I have used the hotkey Alt+C exclusively. When not using Word but instead some variant of RichEdit (for example in WordPad) this becomes Alt+X instead. Also, as mentioned in the comments, for some people apparently it's Alt+X in Word, too. In the interest of brevity I will only talk about Alt+C, but you should use whatever variant applies to you. Another method, mentioned in this answer would be to use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 which seems to work as well. Just in case there aren't enough options yet.

Note 2: In the overview of characters used for the smiley above the spacing seems off in some places. This had technical reasons and may differ from one browser to another. Also some combining characters tended to disappear which is why some of them are shifted to the right.

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  • 10
    Or see "Insert Unicode characters via the keyboard?" at superuser.com/questions/47420/…
    – Arjan
    Oct 8, 2009 at 9:21
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    And for those not seeing the funny characters: read about using "Arial Unicode MS" in "Get Dingbats to appear in Firefox 3?" at superuser.com/questions/14087/…
    – Arjan
    Oct 8, 2009 at 9:25
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    Arial Unicode MS is not a sane font to use: blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/07/15/3890144.aspx ... in fact, the smileys display horribly here with Arial Unicode MS. Pasting them into word uses a mixture of Arial, Calibri and Cordia New. Please don't recommend Arial Unicode MS where it does more harm than good (almost everywhere, if we are to believe Michael Kaplan). Verdana also works well.
    – Joey
    Oct 8, 2009 at 9:38
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    In Word 2007 (on XP), it seems to be Alt+X that does the conversion, not Alt+C. Oct 22, 2009 at 7:17
  • Graham: incorporated into the answer. Or at least a little clarified. Perhaps I should just talk about "The Hotkey™" instead of giving any specific keystrokes ...
    – Joey
    Oct 22, 2009 at 15:24
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Copy and paste:

◎ܫ◎

ಠﭛಠ

⊙_ʘ

♨_♨

ಠ_ಠ

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  • teddy, om nom, hurr?, the goggles, and my all time fav unicode expression.
    – user939
    Oct 22, 2009 at 13:15
  • In what OS/browser does this look alright? (Not in any browser on my Mac or an old WinXP, though on WinXP Firefox does the best job only not displaying the 4th correctly.)
    – Arjan
    Jan 13, 2010 at 14:04
  • vista and 7, ie and chrome.
    – user939
    Jan 13, 2010 at 15:46
  • 2
    Windows character map.
    – Warren P
    Jul 30, 2010 at 18:47
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    ಠ_ರೃ is a good one too
    – kenwarner
    Sep 11, 2010 at 12:10
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If these are too complex, Unicode #263A (☺) and Unicode #2639 (☹) are supported by most OSes and browsers.

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As Johannes Rössel said , you can use this online editor to convert ascii characters to unicode / your preferable format and change it whenever you need.

Online Unicode Converter

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What do you mean? You're doing them already. Just look up the Unicode characters and start combining them in your way.

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