Insert special characters into any document with WinCompose

Numbers, letters, basic symbols and punctuation -- your keyboard covers all the typing basics. But what if you need to enter accented characters, math symbols, superscripts, or anything else a little less standard?

WinCompose is an open source tool for Windows which can insert special characters and symbols into just about any document or application.

The program is very easy to use. On launch it adds an icon to your system tray. Pressing and releasing a hotkey (Right Alt by default) activates it, you type a sequence of characters representing a symbol, and it’s inserted into the current document.

You’ll need to learn the sequences for each symbol, of course, but that’s much simpler than you might think. A heart ♥ is <3 ; a copyright symbol © is oc ; "plus or minus" ± is +- ; Ø is /O, Ñ is ~N and the list goes on.

It really does go on, too, with the program supporting more than 1,700 rules. If you’ve used anything based on the Xorg or dotXCompose projects then you’ll know these already, but if not, it’s easy to browse them for the sequences you need, and there’s also an option to add custom rules of your own.

WinCompose is an open source application for Windows XP and later.