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Introduce support for the Special Characters toolbar on mobile
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Description

This task involves the work of introducing the Special Characters toolbar on mobile.

The need for this ticket emerged in T249072.

Tool/InterfaceTicket
Mobile DiscussionTools (Reply Tool + New Topic Tool)
Mobile VisualEditor

Event Timeline

Re: mobile. I don't think we've ever made this tool available on mobile, nor do I think there is the same need there as localised IME's are almost universally available on mobile.

Not the same need, but there’s still need; localized IMEs often don’t support as many special characters as the VisualEditor special characters tool. For example, out of the 19 characters available in the Frequently used panel on English Beta Wikipedia (MediaWiki:Visualeditor-quick-access-characters.json), I found only 9 on my Samsung phone’s default keyboard, more than the half is unavailable.

… pleased to know … now available within the desktop … Tools …

...I think the use case applies to mobile as well as desktop. It would be great if some buttons could be conditionally shown where there is sufficient width (tablet, or phone in landscape orientation), but that adds complexity.

One should note the different requirements for accuracy on talk pages vs article pages.
3 * 4 = 12 is probably understandable on a talk page, while in an article we should probably strive for 3 × 4 = 12.

This varies by user. Probably nobody expects others to use × on talk pages, but there are users (including me) who expect themselves to be precise even on talk pages.

If space constraint is the concern, maybe the special characters could be put in the same menu where formatting options (bold, italic etc.) are.