Introduction
In addition to standard characters, you can type bullets, dashes, fixed-width spaces, mathematical symbols, international characters, and other special characters.
For a list of characters in the Symbol and Zapf Dingbats fonts, a list of accented characters in the standard character set, and information on inserting the Euro currency symbol, see the online manual FrameMaker Character Sets.
Some special characters are entered or displayed differently in dialog boxes. In Windows, you enter a sequence of characters beginning with a backslash (\), these sequences are listed in Dialog boxes.
Tabulators
Each
time you press tab ↹, a tab symbol 
is embedded in the
text. The symbol does not appear in the printed document, but it
is visible onscreen when text symbols are visible.
If the current paragraph has tab stops set, FrameMaker moves the insertion point and text one tab stop each time you press tab ↹. If tab stops are not set, pressing tab ↹ doesn’t move the insertion point and text. If you press tab ↹ more times than you have tab stops, the Tab symbols overlap. If you later add tab stops to the paragraph, FrameMaker positions the text correctly at the tab stops.
FrameMaker uses tab stops that are absolute rather than relative. With relative tab stops, each time you press Tab, the insertion point moves to the next available tab stop. With absolute tab stops, the nth tab on a line moves the insertion point to the nth stop. If that tab stop is to the left of the insertion point, the insertion point does not move.
Whitespace characters
When you press the space bar, you insert a proportional space (whose width depends on the characters on either side of it). You can also insert special fixed-width spaces—for example, to increase the space between two words. When you type a special space between two words, the words always remain together on one line.
You can use the following types of special spaces:
An em space is the same width as the point size of the font you use. For example, if you use a 10‑point font, an em space is 10 points wide.
An en space is half the width of an em space.
A numeric space is the same width as the font zero (0) character. All digits are typically the same width. This space is useful for aligning numbers in a column without using tabs.
A thin space is one-twelfth the width of an em space. A thin space is used to separate a number and the unit of measure that follows it, or characters that appear too close together—such as ” /)”.
A nonbreaking space is the same width as the default space width for the font.
When Smart Spaces is on, you can’t type more than one proportional space in a row. However, you can type multiple fixed-width spaces.
Smart quotes
When Smart Quotes is on, FrameMaker uses a curved
left, right quotation mark, or the quotation marked you have defined
in the Preferences dialog.
Whenever you press the single or double quote (
, 
, or 
) key,
the configured quotation mark is entered based on your preferences.
As the Smart Quotes are language-dependent, the language defined
for the paragraph style determines the quote to use.
Smart Quotes doesn’t apply to text in dialog boxes. For information on typing quotation marks and apostrophes in dialog boxes, see Character sets.
To set smart specials in the book window, select the documents you want to affect.
Choose .
Change the Smart Spaces or Smart Quotes option and click Apply.