Sections and pilcrows — making the § and ¶ on the iPhone

Yesterday, I reviewed an app called Codification, which uses for its icon the section symbol — §.  That is certainly a symbol that lawyers need to type a lot, but it isn’t immediately apparent how to do so on an iPhone or iPad.  I was discussing this with Ray Ward, an appellate attorney at my law firm who also publishes the great blogs The (New) Legal Writer and Louisiana Civil Appeals, and he reminded me that it is almost impossible to create the pilcrow on an iPhone.  The what?  Yeah, I had to look that one up too; a pilcrow is a symbol that most lawyers call the paragraph symbol — ¶.

You can type many additional characters using the iPhone and iPad keyboard by holding down on a letter.  I see that I haven’t posted a full list of those shortcuts since 2010, back when iPhone J.D. had far fewer readers, so I thought it might be useful to post the list again, which is largely still the same in iOS 8:

First, there are additional characters that you can access from the iPhone/iPad keyboard by holding your finger down on the vowels A, E, I, O and U:

You can also hold your finger down on the consonants C, L, N, S, Y and Z:

 

Here are the extra characters for the punctuation marks and symbols.  (The blue characters are the one on which you hold down your finger to create the other symbols.)

One small addition since my 2010 post is that now when you hold down your finger on the dash, you have the option of creating an en dash, an em dash or a bullet.  You can also create the bullet directly from the keyboard, but I suppose it makes sense to also put it behind the dash because folks often use either a dash or a bullet to create a list.

I see two other changes since 2010.  First, you can hold down on / to get \.  Second, you can now hold down on $ to get symbols for the Russian Ruble, Japanese Yen, Euro, Cent, British Pound and South Korean Won.  (The Ruble and the Cent are new additions behind the $; the Ruble symbol is itself new, having been adopted by Russia in 2013.)

So as you can see from the above, if you want to create a § on the iPhone keyboard, you can access the & key by pressing the 123 button at the bottom left, and then hold down as you press the ampersand. 

But what about that pesky pilcrow?  As useful as the paragraph symbol is for lawyers, there is no way to create it using the built-in iOS keyboard.  Instead, you need to find a way to copy the ¶ from someplace else so that you can then you can paste it into an email.

Back in 2009, I recommended a free web app called Glyphboard that let you copy a ¶ and paste it into an email.  The web page is still there, but it doesn’t work the same way in iOS 8 so I don’t recommend it anymore.

One solution is to install a third party keyboard on your iPhone or iPad and store the ¶ there.  For example, back in 2009 I interviewed Mike Schneider, an attorney who left the practice of law to write iPhone apps.  He recently released a free keyboard called SnipsKey that lets you store bits of text that you might want to use again, and then access that text by simply tapping a button.  SnipsKey is especially useful if you want to store a long string of text and save yourself the trouble of typing it over and over again, but you can also use it to store something that is one character long, like the ¶.  In the following example, I simply selected the SnipsKey keyboard by tapping the globe icon at the bottom left, then tapped my Paragraph shortcut, which I chose to put at the top for easy access.  (Tap Edit to rearrange your shortcuts.)

 

Click here for SnipKeys (free): 

Another option is to use an app designed to let you create special characters.  Although I haven’t tried it myself, I see that there is an older iPad app called Cymbol which lets you enter symbols, including a pilcrow.

Another option is to use an external bluetooth keyboard with your iPhone or iPad.  You can create a ¶ by typing Option-7, and you can create a § by typing Option-6.  (Those are the same shortcuts that work on an Mac.)

[UPDATE:  As several folks have suggested in the Comments to this post, another option is to create a keyboard shortcut for the ¶.  Great idea!  See the comments for more details.]

And finally, you can always just find a webpage that has the ¶ symbol on it, go to that webpage, and copy the ¶ and then paste it into your email or document on your iPhone or iPad.  Feel free to come back to this specific post as often as you want.