[Tex/LaTex] How to make latex recognize tick and cross symbols

sphinxsymbolsunicode

I'm looking for a way of making latex recognize the tick and cross symbols as apposed to having to use commands in latex code to make these symbols. Is there anything you can add in the preamble that supports the use of such characters?

The reason for this is that I'm generating a pdf and html document from the same source, so using commands unique to latex will mess up the formatting of my html doc.

Even still, I don't seem to be able to use the \checkmark command (after including the \usepackage{amsfonts}). I believe this because I'm using Sphinx – a tool that uses a mark up language of its own – to convert a document into latex format then pdf. I think it misses the \commandgoeshere bits when going from the markup to latex.

Thanks

Edit:
Having spent some tome on it, it appears that the solution proposed below works perfectly. The problem is in fact to do with sphinx. When making these changes in the .tex file, the pdf that is generated produces the desired results. But when making the change to the preamble through the configuration file and then run make latexpdf an error gets thrown up relating to something (though it looks like nothing) in the latex.py file right in the guts of sphinx. But I guess this is to be discussed in a different post

Best Answer

This should do what you need:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{✓}{\checkmark}
\newunicodechar{✠}{\maltese}
\begin{document}

\Large ✓ \quad ✠

\end{document}

Here's the result

enter image description here

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