How to Create ASCII Bullets in Plain Text Documents

When creating articles or documents on-line there is often a loss of fancy formatting and bullets as these are changed to an incomprehensible character (or even an upside down question mark or an array of other incomprehensible characters). I decided enough was enough and I had to find a simple solution.

So here it is...

It is a simple matter of putting the right Unicode character into the document. So what is Unicode? Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text.

So how do I add Unicode characters to my text document?

This is where a little used application called Character Map comes in handy. You should be able to find this under Accessories in your start menu. When you start Character Map you should see the following:

At first this look like a very innocuous data set, after all we know how to get the majority of these characters, they are on our keyboard the © or the ® are characters that Microsoft Word will create for us when we type (c) or (r). To obtain characters usable for bullets you will need to scroll a few pages down to a page that looks something like this.

Using the mouse you can click on the desired character to form your bullet, it will become larger, like this:

If you click on the “Select” button the character you select will be placed into the “Characters to copy” field as follows:

Click on “Copy” to copy it into the computers buffer.

Now go to the on-line document that you are editing and paste the character into the right place. Here is an example of the finished item:

For the majority of on-line documents the bullets will not be able to be indented so it is important that minor bullets clearly denote that these are subsidiary items to the item with the bolder bullet. I have tried various combinations but the combination here seems to work best for me. Please remember for a document like an on-line profile the reader needs to read the text not be amazed by the bullet, so simplicity sells.

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