Number 220 - September 2001
When It's Not On The Keyboard...
Author Unknown
    It's easy enough to find the dollar sign ($) on your keyboard, but where do you find the cents sign, ¢? And if you prefer ½ to 1/2, where do you find this? And if you want to ask where the bathroom is in Spanish ¿Donde esta el baño?) where do you find the special characters you need (not to mention symbols like ®, ©, and ¥)?

    All these symbols (and many more) can be found in the Windows Character Map. Go to Start, Run and type in charmap. When the Character Map appears, just choose your font, and click on the special symbol you need. Then click Select, Copy.

    Finally - get into the document where you want the symbol(s) to appear and go to Edit, Paste (or use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl V.)

    Each of these special characters has a numeric code, which. when used with your Alt key, can also generate the symbol. For instance, Alt 0191 produces the upside down question mark, ¿. But you must use the numbers on your 10-key numeric keypad to do this. (The numbers along the top of the keyboard won't work.)

    So where do you find these numeric codes? Click on a symbol in Character Map and the code will appear in its lower right hand corner.
    If you use MS-Word, you can accomplish the above more easily by going to Insert, Symbol.

    Also - if you use a certain symbol frequently, you can put it into Word's AutoCorrect area. For instance, if when you type "manana" It will automatically turn into "mañana." To do this, go to Tools, AutoCorrect and type manana into the "Replace" box. Then put mañana into the "With" box. So how do you get mañana into this box? Simply create the ñ using any of the methods above and use it to spell out mañana. Then select mañana (by double-clicking the word) and use Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste to paste mañana into the "With" box. (Ctrl C and Ctrl V can be used as keyboard shortcuts for the Copy and Paste actions.)

TOGGLE Editor's Note:

    We use Pagemaker's Times New Roman typeface to format the printed form of this newsletter, and Helvetica for Headers. To place the special characters in the text you are reading we simply enter the Alt+0+nnn numerical sequence for the character desired where we want it placed. Although the symbol codes are generally used by most fonts, we have found an occasional font that does not produce the desired character. Sticking with the well-known "standards" should keep you out of trouble.

   
  Number 220 - September 2001