Add Special Character Menu

[lizkarkoski]

Low priority request.

Add a special character menu to the Gutenberg menu tools.

Describe the solution you'd like
A menu button for inserting special characters with Gutenberg.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The only way I can work out to add special characters when using Gutenberg is to switch over to the code editor, add the html for the desired character, and then switch back to the visual editor to continue working.

Request brought to us through a forum post here:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/public-post-preview-special-characters/

[TheDavidJohnson]

In TinyMCE, I used special characters a TON. I'm really missing them in Gutenberg!

[tofumatt]

By special characters, do you mean things like emojis? As a MacOS user I usually use the OS-wise special character menu accessed via Control + Command + Space. Does Windows/*NIX have something similar?

Something like:

right?

[designsimply]

This was discussed in #1678 and ended with the character map being accessible in the Classic block and encouragement to implement in other areas as a plugin.

Thank you for the feedback, and if you still feel strongly, consider adding details about your use case in #1678 even though it has been closed.

[TheDavidJohnson]

By special characters, do you mean things like emojis?

@tofumatt -- not emoji, but the special characters behind the "Omega" symbol in the Classic editor

The discussion thread from the forum post mentioned earlier harvested a handful of items that are used on a daily basis by certain types of writers:

• journalists and other "traditional" writers make constant use of the em dash
• non-breaking spaces (for orphans and widows in subheadings)
• accented vowels for words of Spanish and French origin
• common symbols for intellectual property purposes like copyrights and trademarks: ©, ®, ™
• etc.

[MaricaCB]

I frequently need to insert statistical special characters such as "X-bar" and alpha, beta, etc. Really would like for those Greek and statistical characters to be available in the text format box.

[GlennMartin1]

The most-used block is the Paragraph block - so it needs to be highly functional and full-featured.

This issue should definitely be reopened. There needs to be a solution to this.

[Jan-Paul-Kleijn]

Why is this issue closed?
Until this plugin provides proper text tools it should not EVER be included standard in WordPress.
I live in Europe, and everytime I want to insert a euro symbol I need the special character tool to insert it because my keyboard does not support it.
But here I am talking about myself. Far more important is all the angry clients that are scolding me through the phone. Just because WP thought it would be wise to replace the editor with a handicapped one.
What were you thinking? Remove all this great functionality and maybe people won't notice?

By the way, the remarks from people in this thread astound me. Some do not even understand what special characters are. Have I arrived in Wonderland?

[designsimply]

@JanPaulKleijn I closed this issue because I wanted to consolidate to #1678 as this issue is a duplicate. I have added your use case to #1678 and would like to say that I appreciate that you have voiced your concern and that even though this issue has been closed, I think it's worth listening to and documenting example use cases (specifics are helpful!) in one place.

[phpbits]

Hi everyone! I've just added Special Characters inserter format on EditorsKit plugin. Using this plugin you can now have the missing formats from Classic Editor to Gutenberg Block Editor. Here's the preview and I hope everyone will find this very helpful. Thanks!

[arielestigarribia]

Hi @phpbits , nice job! How can we have this features in the EditorsKit for Drupal Gutenberg?