What do you do when you have to type special characters that doesn’t exist on your keyboard — perhaps an é or two for a fancy résumé or an ñ for a piece about El Niño? How about typographically correct “quotes”, proper dashes — like so — or paragraph symbols?¶

Do you waste time scrolling through endless pages of the Character Map (Windows)/Character Palette (Mac)? Do you try to memorize often unintuitive Options codes (Mac) or even more nonsensical Alt codes (Windows)?

Well, if you’re a Linux, BSD, or UNIX user, you may be using the super-convenient Compose key mechanism, which includes such intuitive codes as 'e for é, ~n for ñ, --- for —, oc for ©, and many more.

Cool, can I use a Compose key?

If you’re a Windows or Mac user, unfortunately not — or at least not until now.

This is where webcomposekey comes in

With this new little tool, you can now use intuitive Compose key sequences in any full-featured web browser, on Windows PCs and Macs. There is no software to install. All you have to do to use webcomposekey is to add a special bookmark — a so-called bookmarklet — to your web browser.

How to use webcomposekey

1. Add the bookmarklet

• Create a new bookmark in your browser
• Instead of a regular web address, enter this

2. Start the bookmarklet

• Load the web page where you’d like to enter Compose key sequences
• Click on your newly created bookmarklet

If all goes well, you should see this notification in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window:

3. Enter Compose key mode

• Press and hold the Ctrl key
• Press and hold the Alt key
• Press c
• Release all the three keys

If all goes well, you should see a notification like this in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window:

4. Enter a Compose key sequence

If all goes well, you should end up with a special character or series of characters in the selected input field. ☺

Available sequences

also available as a wider table on its own page

Testing, testing

Once you have invoked webcomposekey — either by adding the bookmarklet using the method outlined above or by clicking here — you can test it by entering Compose key sequences in the input fields below.

… or here.

To also see debugging messages, use one of these pages.

To do

• Categorize sequences
  • Have multiple sequence charts
• More Compose key sequences
• Add sequences requested by users
• Improve the notification system
• Improve the help screen
• Rewrite/streamline/polish and spell-check this page
• ?

Browser support

webcomposekey has been tested and been found to be working in

• Firefox 3.6.x (Linux and Windows)
• Google Chrome 8.0.x (Linux and Windows)
• Opera 10.x (Linux and Windows)
• Safari 5.0.x (Windows)
• Chromium 8.0.5 (Linux)
• Rekonq 0.6.1 (Linux)

Known problems

Cross-browser

• When the bookmarklet is started after the target text field has already been given focus, the user has to click outside the text field and the again on the text field.

Browser-dependent

• webcomposekey currently does not work in Internet Explorer, due to IE’s non-standard key handling. Fixing this is a low priroity.
• Opera doesn’t properly consume the F1 key-press when in Compose mode.

Reporting bugs and giving feedback

PENDING

Fixed bugs

• Key events in Compose mode are now properly consumed in Opera (except for F1).
• webcomposekey now works in Google Apps.