Font: Very interesting. Would never have thought of checking the font.
I think that I did not express myself correctly. Yes, there is a panoply of possible arrows to choose from, but only very few are of decent size. The others are microscopic.
If you use a HBM to insert an arrow, you want the arrow to be large enough to be quite obvious, such as 
. There are other arrow formats, such as ↥ and many others, but the alternatives are too small. One can increase the font, but that creates a major pain because the subsequent text following the arrow will be in the larger font.
I think that the only solution is the one you suggested, namely 
and use ➤ for right arrow.
what is the simplest way to search-copy-paste Characters? Using the System ⌃⌘ Spacebar has a rather poor search function.
thanks again