Re: TECH: help, special characters

On 6/10/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> A while back there was discussion of this, and IIRC someone told how to
> insert unicode chars. in Open Office (???) by typing in the number, then
> hitting some combination of keys involving Alt-x ?? IIRC I experimented at
> the time, and it worked, but now.....
>
> I don't seem to be able to do it, and need reminding of the exact sequence
> (assuming I'm remembering correctly). Reply offlist, I think.
>
By now I have no doubt that you have received  your requested off-list
reply, but this was bugging me as-well, so I thought I'd share with
the group.

The app in question is MIcrosoft Word, not OpenOffice.  If you type a
Unicode code point in hexadecimal, and then hit Alt-X, the digits you
have just typed are replaced in your document by the corresponding
Unicode character.  You may hit Alt-X a second time to turn them back
to digits if the conversion was inadvertent.

There is a somewhat more universal method that will work in any
Windows application. Just as you have always been able to enter any
Latin-1 (or, rather, Windows-1252) character by holding down the Alt
key (left Alt, not AltGr) and typing the decimal code on the numeric
keypad, you can also enter any Unicode character by holding down the
Alt key, first typing the plus sign (the one on the keypad, not the
main keyboard), and then the hexadecimal code.

The problem here is that menu shortcuts interfere; for instance, if I
try to enter U+012B LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH MACRON right now in my
browser, it doesn't work; the Alt+B is taken as a request to open the
Bookmarks menu.

Like the display of supplementary characters, this may require that
you add a value to your Registry manually: under key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method, create a new REG_SZ
(String) with value "1".



--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

Replies