Arve Bersvendsen

‽

The interrobang is one of my favorite punctuation marks, intended to combine the exclamation mark and the question mark. Every time I use it though, I get the same question: How do you type it?

The short answer is: The interrobang is to be found in Unicode, at the code point U+203D, so the question here is really “How to type Unicode characters?”

In Gnome/GTK+ applications

In Gnome/GTK applications, you type the character by first pressing Ctrl-Shift-U, at which time you will get an underlined u to the left of the editing caret. You then type in the Unicode code point, 203D. When you now press space, the interrobang will now display. In XFCE, replace space with Ctrl-Shift-X (this also sort of works in Gnome, except in the console, where it will insert junk.

In Opera

In Opera, this works a bit differently: When a text field is focused, you first write the Unicode code point, 203d and then press Ctrl-Shift-X. The chaaracter should now change to the desired ‽.

In Windows XP/Vista

The procedure for Windows XP/Vista is nearly identical as for Opera, just replace Ctrl-Shift-X with Alt-X.

In KDE

Sorry, you’re out of luck (for now) - use a character selector application or applet for now, or even use Opera to edit text.

Bonus

Those familiar with Spanish know that a question or exclamation in Spanish starts with an upside-down punctuation mark, “¿Que?” or “¡Hola!”, and there is an upside-down interrobang, at U+2E18, so you can now go all “⸘Que‽” on people

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