I am trying to use the infinity symbol by copying from the character map to Illustrator. When I paste it, I get a question mark instead of the infinity symbol.
I've tried pasting first into Word and then copying from there. I can get the inifinity symbol in Word but then when I copy from Word to Illustrator I get a number 8. (You could say I'm getting closer 
)
Any help?
My guess is that the problem is due to Illustrator's lack of Unicode support. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do about it, other than re-encoding a font to put the infinity symbol in an accessible 8-bit character position.
Good tip. Thanks for your help.
Does Illustrator have the same problem on the Mac?
Yes. These days, Adobe are pretty much maintaining total parity between their apps on different platforms. One of the ways in which they are managing this is by not using common system text components; they are 'rolling their own' instead. Gradually, the core text processing of each Adobe app is being rewritten to support Unicode encoding. InDesign and Photoshop have this done already. My guess is that Illustrator is likely to be next, but Adobe refuse to comment.
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