I like using unusual text characters to decorate my site, for example, my home page uses lots of mid-dots (· ·) and chevrons (» »), as well as other special characters. To keep the HTML source from being cluttered with those inscrutable numeric entities, I wrote this Django tag:

special_ch = {
    '':     '',
    '>>':   '»',    # RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    '<<':   '&#xab;',    # LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    '(c)':  '&#xa9;',    # COPYRIGHT SIGN
    'S':    '&#xa7;',    # SECTION SIGN
    '*':    '&#x2022;',  # BULLET
    '.':    '&#xb7;',    # MIDDLE DOT
    '-':    '&#x2013;',  # EN DASH
    '--':   '&#x2014;',  # EM DASH
    ':>':   '&#x25b6;',  # BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE
    'o':    '&#x25e6;',  # WHITE BULLET
    '[]':   '&#x25ab;',  # WHITE SMALL SQUARE
    '<>':   '&#x25c7;',  # WHITE DIAMOND
    }

@register.simple_tag
def ch(value):
    return '&#xa0;'.join([special_ch[s] for s in value.split(' ')])


Now I can use the ch tag with a mnemonic representation of the character in question. Spaces become non-breaking spaces to help control the layout around these characters:

<p>{% ch ">> " %}more text..</p>
<p>{% ch "(c) " %}2002{% ch "-" %}2009</p>


becomes

» more text..

© 2002–2009

The tag reference takes more space than the entities, but I can tell how they will display, without having to memorize the Unicode code points.