Alt Codes & Symbol Reference
Every symbol with its Windows Alt code, HTML entity and Unicode point. Filter or search, then click any character to copy it.
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What alt codes are, and where they came from
An alt code is a way of typing a character that is not printed on your keyboard. You hold the Alt key, type a number on the numeric keypad, and release, and the matching symbol appears. The trick dates back to the original IBM PC of 1981, where it was the only way to reach the line-drawing pieces and accented letters that the keys themselves could not produce.
There are really two systems at work here, which is why some codes on this page carry a leading zero and some do not. Typing Alt followed by a plain number from 1 to 255 reaches into the old DOS character set known as code page 437, the one with the smiling faces and box-drawing pieces. Adding a leading zero, as in Alt 0233, reaches the later Windows set instead, where the same numbers map to a more modern range of letters and punctuation. That single leading zero is the switch between the two worlds.
Today nearly all of these characters have a tidier home in Unicode, the one standard that every phone, laptop and website now shares, and you can copy them straight from a page like this one. The alt codes have stuck around because millions of people learned them by heart, and habits like reaching for Alt 0176 to get a degree sign are hard to give up.
On a web page there is a third way to write a character, the HTML entity. Typing © in your markup produces the copyright sign and ° produces the degree sign, using either a friendly name or the character’s number. Every symbol on AltChart lists its HTML entity next to its alt code, so you can reach for whichever one your task needs.
Every symbol on AltChart is drawn in JuliaMono, a typeface made by the designer known as cormullion for the Julia programming language. Scientific computing needs a huge range of symbols, so JuliaMono grew to cover far more of Unicode than most fonts do, and that is what lets this site show every character in one consistent style rather than borrowing mismatched shapes from your operating system. It is free and open source, and you can find it at github.com/cormullion/juliamono.