Button Label Codes
On the Button Setup screen, you specify the label on a button. You can include codes that will display special characters such as symbols and arrows. This table has some commonly used codes. Skip to Discussion.
Symbol |
Code |
|---|---|
← |
\u2190 |
↑ |
\u2191 |
→ |
\u2192 |
↓ |
\u2193 |
↵ |
\u21B5 |
↖ |
\u2196 |
↗ |
\u2197 |
↘ |
\u2198 |
↙ |
\u2199 |
☉ |
\u2609 |
▶ |
\u25B6 |
◉ |
\u25C9 |
⌂ |
\u2302 |
⇤ |
\u21E4 |
⇥ |
\u21E5 |
⌘ |
\u2318 |
⌥ |
\u2325 |
✘ |
\u2718 |
⌑ |
\u2311 |
☜ |
\u261C |
☝ |
\u261D |
☞ |
\u261E |
☟ |
\u261F |
↞ |
\u219E |
↠ |
\u21A0 |
⇚ |
\u21DA |
⇛ |
\u21DB |
☺ |
\u263A |
☹ |
\u2639 |
Discussion
On the Button Setup screen, you can specify the label that should appear on a button, but the device keyboard only has letters, numbers, and a limited number of symbols. However, you can include many other characters or symbols by including special codes in the label field.
A special code is in the format "\uFFFF" (without the quotes) where FFFF is actually exactly four hexadecimal digits that represent a 16-bit Unicode character. It doesn't matter if the "u" or hexidecimal digits are uppercase or lowercase, it works either way. Lowercase is easier to type, but for clarity we show the hexidecimal digits here in uppercase.
For example, to label a button with a smiley face, use the label "\u263A". Unicode is a character set supported by OS X that has many thousands of characters, including international language characters, arrows, shapes, and many symbols. This device can render a very large number of them. (Any characters the device can't render will appear as a square box.) The table above shows some codes useful for labels on remote control buttons, but there are many more.
A number of sites on the Internet enumerate the full Unicode character set and can let you find the corresponding four hex digit code. On a Macintosh running OS X 10.5 Leopard, a very good way to see all the Unicode characters is as follows:
In the Finder's Edit menu, choose "Special Characters..." to bring up the character browser panel. From the panel's "View" popup menu, select "Code Tables", then select the "Unicode" tab. You can now see and scroll through all the Unicode characters. Click on a character, and a tooltip appears showing its hexadecimal code. Use that code, prefixed with "\u" in the button's label field.
You can put any number of characters, special or otherwise, in a button's label. The more characters in a label, the smaller in size they will be. At some point, the size won't get smaller - instead, extra characters in the label will be truncated.