The samples of smileys, and all kinds of other shapes & stuff ~~~ posted by MtheGM copy to my Word as being from a font called "MS Mincho." MS Mincho appears to be an "extended Unicode" font that contains a fairly rich set of "oriental(?)" characters, along with most of the Latin A characters, so it may be of use for persons who write a in both "eastern" and "western" languages. English text using this font isn't particularly "pretty" or readable (IMO), but it should be serviceable enough if needed.

Since it's a "large character set" loading it may burden some computers, especially for older OS versions if they've got a lot of other fonts installed. It's one of the "standard fonts" in a default installation of Vista, but may not be available to users of older (Windows) Operating Systems. Even if that particular font is on a machine, the OS/browser may choose a different one to render characters outside the font selected by the user.

Some browsers can apply "looks like" translations to select an alternative font that contains extended characters, so glyphs like those illustrated may be visible – or not – by people reading your posts. Most current browsers (and wp programs & such) can "find a font" containing any properly defined character if it's identified by its Unicode Character Number, but characters using "symbol utilities" contained in some OS versions and in some wp and browser programs are "variously successful" since some of those methods rely on local "glyph maps" that use non-standard character numbers along with a special font.

For any character that isn't on your keyboard it probably is still preferable that you insert your "special character" in a post at mudcat using the html code and the Unicode char number

To show ❂ you would type ❂

To show ♞ you would type ♞

To show ☹ you would type ☹

To show ☎ you would type ☎

To show ❤ you would type ❤

To show ✂ you would type ✂

To show ☜ you would type ☜

To show ☸ you would type ☸

To show 〠 you would type 〠

To show ☃ you would type ☃

To show ✌ you would type ✌

Unicode defines character numbers for about 4 million unique characters. Some of them might be considered "cute."

Most "western computers" are capable of entering and displaying approximately 2,000 characters that are in most common use.

That means that approximately 0.0000535 percent of the characters you can "theoretically" post here will be legible while the rest of them will be meaningless and illegible.

It is suggested you don't f**k around indiscriminately with the 99.99465 percent that aren't going to work.

If you feel you MUST USE a character that's even remotely questionable, you need to check the preview box and look at what's going to appear IF you post it. If you can't read it in the preview, it's fairly likely that nobody else can either.

(Even if you can read it, about half of mudcat readers may still be unable to read anything more than a little unusual, and there's no monetary value in getting tagged with an "Amos Award.")

John