Re: TECH: help, special characters

Mark J. Reed wrote:
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.....
> >
> By now I have no doubt that you have received  your requested off-list
> reply,
Actually, no. Probably because it's NOT possible in OOWriter; it's supposed
to be possible in MS Word, but not in the version I have; but that's OK,
because in (my) Word you can create your own shortcut keystrokes at the
"Special Characters" box. It does work in Wordpad, but I don't use that for
ordinary ms. stuff.

Finally in desperation and annoyance I went to OOO's website, found their
"forum" and found an answer. As usual, on paper it sounds very convoluted,
but in practice isn't. You have to create a macro, then assign the
keystroke. It takes many steps... I mention this in case other users of OO
Writer have been wondering; I copied the instructions for the macro and will
send them to anyone who asks.  (I'm not sure I could find them in the
"forum" again :-(((( )

but this was bugging me as-well, so I thought I'd share with
> the group.
(snip the bit about MS Word)

> 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.
An excellent tip, never before mentioned AFAIK. But it doesn't work for
me........alas
>
> 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".
That, and your subsequent revision---
> Sigh. And the name "EnableHexNumpad" (since Input Method is indeed a
key, not a value) . . .

is probably what I would need to do...if I dared.