Printables
Symbol Cheat Sheet
The most-used symbols grouped for quick lookup.
Short answer
The symbols people reach for most often, grouped by what they do rather than by which Unicode block they came from — because you generally know the job, not the block.
What is on the sheet
The symbols people reach for most often, grouped by job rather than by Unicode block: arrows, dividers, brackets, currency, ticks and crosses, and the punctuation marks that ASCII lacks. Grouping by purpose is deliberate — you almost always know what you want the symbol to do, not which block it lives in.
How to use it
Keep it near the desk as a lookup for the characters that are awkward to type. The dashes and quotation marks are the ones worth learning properly, because using the correct character costs nothing in compatibility and immediately improves how text reads.
Printing notes
Single sheet, black and white, A4 or US Letter. The glyphs are set large enough to distinguish similar shapes — an en dash from an em dash, a hyphen from a minus sign — which is the whole reason to have it on paper.
The dashes are the part worth actually learning
Most of the sheet is lookup, but the dashes repay study, because they are the characters people get wrong most often and the ones that most visibly improve a piece of text. A hyphen joins words. An en dash marks a range — 1914–18 — and stands between paired items. An em dash sets off an aside. A minus sign is a fourth character again, wider than a hyphen and vertically aligned with the digits so that a column of figures lines up. All four appear on the sheet at a size where the differences are visible, which is the reason to have it on paper rather than in a tab.
Grouped by job, not by block
Unicode's own charts are organised by block, which reflects the order in which characters were added to the standard rather than anything about how they are used. Arrows are scattered across four blocks; the characters you might use for a divider come from at least three. Grouping by purpose means the sheet answers the question you actually have — what do I put between these two things — instead of requiring you to already know where the answer lives, which is precisely the knowledge you do not have when you go looking.