Inserting Special Characters

Emacs uses unicode internally, and can produce any character in the unicode definition. You may, however, not be able to see that character on your screen because your Linux distribution doesn't have the proper font to show it. If you know the character by its unicode name, you can insert it that way. Type C-x 8 RETURN and then begin typing its name. Emacs will load the list of known unicode characters and try to guess. For example, C-x 8 RETURN BLACK CLUB SUIT will produce $\clubsuit$.

If you know the character's code, you can enter it the same way. The double dagger () is unicode U+2021, so C-x RETURN 2021 RETURN will produce it. Wikipedia has a decent but incomplete list of unicode characters by number⁸ but the source⁹ is more complete, and affords you a sense of the awesome breadth of the unicode standard.

A much more cumbersome method is to change to the `ucs' input-method before inputting a string of characters by their unicode number. Type C-x RET C-\ and when prompted, choose the `ucs' (direct unicode) method. Now type u plus the number of the character (u2021 in this example of the double dagger); repeat for the next characters.

If you make use of some unusual symbols fairly regularly, it is worthwhile to bind those characters to a keystroke. See section 8.2 for details on how to do so.