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Introduction

Instructions for macOS

Instructions for Windows

Introduction

Unicode is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software.

Unicode has the explicit aim of transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings, which find wide usage in various countries, but remain largely incompatible with each other.

Unicode covers almost all scripts (writing systems) currently in use today, including alphabets, abugidas and syllabaries, as well as math/greek and other special symbols.

We are constantly working to improve Prism by providing seamless support and compatibility of texts and special symbols within the program.

While Prism has its own legacy dialog which allows users to enter a set of special symbols, starting with version 8, Prism lets you use any Unicode character when entering text such as row or column titles, or on graphs and layouts.

If you use Unicode to enter a wide variety of special symbols in Prism such as Math, Greek, or International characters, you will get seamless compatibility across platforms, compatibility with other software when you export Prism data, results and save files.

Both Windows and macOS have standard system dialogs to enter Unicode symbols, in particular special symbols such as Math and Greek. On macOS, the dialog is designed nicely so that you can find and enter special Unicode symbols quickly and easily, while on Windows it may require a few more steps.

The following sections provide instructions for entering Unicode symbols in Prism.

macOS

1. Get to the point in Prism when you are ready to enter text.

2. From the Prism Edit menu, choose “Emoji and Symbols”.

3. You will see the Character Viewer window appear. This window can be flipped between two appearances. Click the button at the upper right to flip between those two appearances. 

The image above shows the Character Viewer in its minimized appearance. In this view, categories of characters can be selected at the bottom of the window.

The expanded Character Viewer will reveal more characters grouped by categories, such as, Math/Greek symbols, accented Latin characters, bullets, stars, and other special symbols. You can switch between categories on the left of this window to find additional symbols.

If you want to browse for more characters, you'll need to click the button in the upper left to view the menu, and choose Customize List. Then browse the long list of categories and check the ones you want to see. Then click Done from that dialog, browse the characters or emoji, and select the one you want.

4. Select the symbol in the Character Viewer you want to add in Prism and double-click it. As a result, it will appear at the insertion point in Prism.

If you have a symbol that you use a lot, you can access it in the Frequently Used section in the Character Viewer or add it to the Favorites section.

To add a character to Favorites, select it in the Character Viewer, and then click the ”Add to Favorites” button. Once it is done, the “Favorites“ section with a symbol will appear under that “Frequently Used“ in Character Viewer.

Searching using Unicode code

If you know the code for a Unicode character (four or six "digits", which may actually be letters), you can use it to find this character and add it to Prism. We'll use the example of the Unicode character 22C7, which superimposes a division and multiplication symbol to create a symbol that means "multiplied or divided by". This is useful when displaying a geometric mean and geometric SD. 

For more hints from Apple on how to use Character Viewer dialog - click here.

Windows

Using Character Map

1. From the Start menu, choose Windows Accessories and then open Character Map or type "character map" in the search box on the taskbar, and choose Character Map from the results.

2. Upon opening the Character Map, select the “Advanced view” checkbox

3. Click on the “Group By” dropdown menu and then select “Unicode Subrange“

You will see the “Group By” dialog appear, where unicode categories are used to group similar types of characters available in a font. For example, the Mathematical operators Unicode category groups all of the symbols available for a font.

Searching using Unicode code

If you know a code for a Unicode character (four or six "digits", which may actually be letters), you can use it to find this character in the Character Map dialog. Note that you should know the font which supports a given unicode character. We will use the example of the Unicode character 22C7. It is supported by a number of fonts, for example, by Arial Unicode MS, Cambria, DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI Symbol, Lucida Sans Unicode and others. You can find the full list here.

Select “Unicode” in the “Character set” dropdown menu. Enter the character code into the “Go to Unicode“ box, select the needed font from the "Font" dropdown menu and the character will be displayed first in the grid and will already be selected.

If you want to browse for a character you need, type the name of a character you want to search for in the "Search for" box, and click the Search button.

Getting the character into Prism

1. Select the character you want to insert into Prism in the grid of the Character Map dialog and click the Select button - or double-click on the character. You may select several characters at a time to copy to Prism.

2. After you have selected characters to copy, click the Copy button to copy selected characters into the clipboard.

Now you can paste copied symbols to your Prism documents.

Find more information on the Character Map here.

Using touch keyboard

1. Right-click on the Windows taskbar and select “Show touch keyboard button“.

After you have done that, you will see the touch keyboard icon in the right bottom corner of your screen.

2. Open the touch keyboard at the insertion point in Prism. To find Unicode symbols - click on the "&123" button.

3. To find Greek and Math symbols - click on “Omega“ button.

You can use the settings to optimize the keyboard. There are options to turn on the list of copied items, enable the speech record and change the keyboard style.

Find more details on Touch keyboard here.