Illustrator glyphs for your fonts, how to use them ??? The glyphs panel is tucked away in the type commands in window menu, you can then use it to show all the designs / characters / letters for a particular typeface
Select the typeface you want to examine and select to show the entire set or one of the sub sets. Go to the type tool and start to use the designs in the panel. You can see all the characters in the selected set (or any you select from the bottom of the panel). You can also see alternates, superscripts etc depending on the typeface the top of the panel which is a great way to group things but the list depends on the TTF / OTF etc. To access the designs, with the type tool selected, double click the cell you want and it will appear at the current insertion point.
You can create all kinds of designs using this approach and also combine it with other tools such as the super powerful design tool, touch type
The panel is a useful feature to quickly access all the characters in your typeface without the need for any special characters / codes / decorative designs etc. Especially great if you want to access all the designs in the Apple Color Emoji, try accessing them easily from the keyboard. The panel makes it so much easier to get to the various flags, items of food, Chinese symbols etc
Select the type tool and type some characters and select the type. Go to the panel. You can change the a number of things such as the style in the panel. With the type tool selected, You can double click the required cell and that will change the current selected character or characters to that. You can also double click the entry (without something selected) and that will generate other characters in the current type selection
Select some characters in your word and then go to the panel and double click the character you want to use, it only generates one character (if you have selected six characters, only one will be generated)
Go to a word and and position you cursor at the insertion point for the new characters and double click the design in the panel. Double click multiple times to generate multiple characters
Go to the bottom of the panel and the right side and click on the zoom level for the panel display, increase or decrease. The bigger the size, the less characters will be displayed.
In some character cells in the bottom right corner you will see a little triangle and you can expand that and you will see even more characters to use all grouped so you will see a number of different 9 characters
Lots of different letters can be accessed via this approach, you could always remember the key codes for the characters and generate them that way