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Special characters

The special characters feature lets you insert mathematical operators, currency symbols, punctuation, graphic symbols (such as arrows or bullets), or Unicode letters typically not accessible from the keyboard (such as umlauts or other diacritics). The feature also supports emojis.

# Demo

Use the special characters toolbar button Special characters in the editor below to open a configurable panel with a table of selectable special characters.

Euro foreign exchange reference rates

As of February 10, 2020

All currencies are quoted against the euro (€) as the base currency:

  • Currency: US Dollar, symbol: $, spot: 1.0582
  • Currency: British Pound, symbol: £, spot: 0.8639
  • Currency: Indian Rupee, symbol: , spot: 88.0845
  • Currency: Japanese Yen, symbol: ¥, spot: 157.7100
  • Currency: Russian Ruble, symbol: , spot: 117.2010
  • Currency: Turkish Lira, symbol: , spot: 29.3393

This demo presents a limited set of features. Visit the feature-rich editor example to see more in action.

# Installation

⚠️ New import paths

Starting with version 42.0.0, we changed the format of import paths. This guide uses the new, shorter format. Refer to the Packages in the legacy setup guide if you use an older version of CKEditor 5.

After installing the editor, add the feature to your plugin list and toolbar configuration:

// Core plugin provides the API for the management of special characters and their categories.
// The other provide a basic set of special characters.
import { ClassicEditor, SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials } from 'ckeditor5';

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [ SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials, /* ... */ ],
        toolbar: [ 'specialCharacters', /* ... */ ],
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

# Configuration

By default, a few categories of special characters have been defined. You can easily customize the special characters available in your WYSIWYG editor installation by adding new categories, extending the existing ones, or removing them altogether.

# Adding a new category

You can define a new special characters category using the SpecialCharacters#addItems() function.

For example, the following plugin adds the “Emoji” category to the special characters dropdown.

import { ClassicEditor, SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials } from 'ckeditor5';

function SpecialCharactersEmoji( editor ) {
    editor.plugins.get( 'SpecialCharacters' ).addItems( 'Emoji', [
        { title: 'smiley face', character: '😊' },
        { title: 'rocket', character: '🚀' },
        { title: 'wind blowing face', character: '🌬️' },
        { title: 'floppy disk', character: '💾' },
        { title: 'heart', character: '❤️' }
    ], { label: 'Emoticons' } );
}

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [
            SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials, SpecialCharactersEmoji,
            // More plugins.
            // ...
        ],
        toolbar: [ 'specialCharacters', /* ... */ ],
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

After adding the above plugin to the editor configuration, the new category will become available in the special characters dropdown.

The title of a special character must be unique across the entire special characters set.

The third argument of the SpecialCharacters#addItems() method is optional. You can use it to specify a label displayed as a category name. It is useful when your editor uses a language other than English. Check out the UI language guide to learn more.

Below you can see a demo based on the example shown above. Use the special characters toolbar button Special characters and then select “Emoticons” from the dropdown. This will let you insert an emoji into the content.

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# Adding characters to an existing category

By using the SpecialCharacters#addItems() function you can also add new special characters to an existing category.

import { ClassicEditor, SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials } from 'ckeditor5';

function SpecialCharactersExtended( editor ) {
    editor.plugins.get( 'SpecialCharacters' ).addItems( 'Mathematical', [
        { title: 'alpha', character: 'α' },
        { title: 'beta', character: 'β' },
        { title: 'gamma', character: 'γ' }
    ] );
}

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [
            SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials, SpecialCharactersExtended,

            // More plugins.
            // ...
        ],
        toolbar: [ 'specialCharacters', /* ... */ ],
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

The title of a special character must be unique across the entire special characters set.

Below you can see a demo based on the example shown above. Use the special characters toolbar button Special characters and then select “Mathematical” from the dropdown. You will see that the category now contains the additional Greek letters introduced by the configuration above.

Greek alphabet letters

Greek alphabet letters are used as math and science symbols.

Here are some examples of Greek letters that you can use to represent angles in a triangle:

  • Letter name: alpha, Greek letter: α
  • Letter name: beta, Greek letter: β
  • Letter name: gamma, Greek letter: γ

# Removing categories

The special characters feature exposes each category as a separate plugin. While the SpecialCharactersEssentials plugin can be used to conveniently include all of them, you can customize the category list by adding individual plugins with particular categories.

By default, the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-special-characters package provides special characters grouped into the following categories:

For example, you can limit the categories to “Mathematical” and “Currency” only by picking the SpecialCharactersMathematical and SpecialCharactersCurrency plugins, like so:

import { ClassicEditor, SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersCurrency, SpecialCharactersMathematical } from 'ckeditor5';

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [
            SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersCurrency, SpecialCharactersMathematical,

            // More plugins.
            // ...
        ],
        toolbar: [ 'specialCharacters', /* ... */ ],
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

Below you can see a demo based on the example shown above. After clicking the special characters toolbar button Special characters, you can see that it contains fewer categories compared to the other editors on this page.

Euro foreign exchange reference rates

As of February 10, 2020

All currencies are quoted against the euro (€) as the base currency:

  • Currency: US Dollar, symbol: $, spot: 1.0951
  • Currency: British Pound, symbol: £, spot: 0.8463
  • Currency: Indian Rupee, symbol: , spot: 78.1070
  • Currency: Japanese Yen, symbol: ¥, spot: 120.1800
  • Currency: Russian Ruble, symbol: , spot: 70.1120
  • Currency: Turkish Lira, symbol: , spot: 6.5897

# Ordering categories

The order of categories in the UI is determined by the order in which they were registered. However, depending on the context in which you use the editor, you might want to change this order, to make it easier to access frequently used characters.

The categories order can be customized using the order array.

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [ SpecialCharacters, SpecialCharactersEssentials, ... ],
        specialCharacters: {
            order: [
                'Text',
                'Latin',
                'Mathematical',
                'Currency',
                'Arrows'
            ]
        }
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

# Common API

The SpecialCharacters plugin registers the UI button component ('specialCharacters').

We recommend using the official CKEditor 5 inspector for development and debugging. It will give you tons of useful information about the state of the editor such as internal data structures, selection, commands, and many more.

# Contribute

The source code of the feature is available at GitHub in https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/tree/master/packages/ckeditor5-special-characters.