Ever buy a font that looks really cool, only, once you get it installed you notice that you have no idea where those special glyphs and alternate characters that you saw in the title cards went? Well, today I’m going to help you achieve your typography dreams.
Adobe Photoshop 2025
In Adobe Photoshop there are 2 ways that you can find these special characters. The Character Menu and the Glyphs Menu.
Character Menu
The Character Menu can be found under: Window > Character. Once opened, you can see things like the font family, style, size, etc., and just below the center of this menu are a bunch of capital T’s, and a bunch of symbols.
Those symbols are buttons that you can use to turn on (or off) certain OpenType features. This can be useful to universally apply things (like ligatures) to your text, without having to find a specific glyph.
Highlight the text you want to modify, and Start Clicking Buttons to see what happens…
The buttons with the T’s will modify the font, but aren’t part of the font. Photoshop is doing this modification.
- Faux Bold
- Faux Italic
- All Caps
- Small Caps
- Superscript
- Subscript
- Underline
- Strikethrough
Symbols that are “greyed out” may not be available in the currently selected font, but clicking these will make different changes.
- Standard Ligatures
- Contextual Alternates
- Discretionary ligatures
- Swash
- Stylistic Alternates
- Titling Alternates
- Ordinals
- Fractions
Glyphs Menu
The Glyphs Menu is located under: Window > Glyphs. This menu is cool because it shows you all of the glyphs available in your current font selection. It’s really useful because you don’t have to click buttons to guess where things are, everything is right here. All you need to do now is Double Click a Glyph in the Glyph Menu to add that character to your text at your cursor’s location.
Unfortunately, depending on how the font is organized, the glyphs may not be in an order that makes sense. Order is determined by the font, so it can (and probably will) be different depending on what font you’re currently using.
Final Thoughts
That should be all you need to know. The Character Menu is good for checking if the OpenType symbols are highlighted, and the Glyphs Menu is good for using them into your copy. Now get out there and make something awesome.
This tutorial should also be backwards compatible with previous versions of Adobe Photoshop. If you run into any issues, let me know.