Special Characters

My blogging friend Paul Steinbrueck has just written a post detailing some of the many special characters available to those of us that use computers.

It’s an excellent post – really.

In my opinion (small though that is) it could have been an awesome post by the addition of telling folks how to access these characters via keyboard or other shortcuts.

Here’s my remedy to that:

In a Windows Environment:

1. Use charmap – in the run box simply type charmap and you’ll see a popup box. Change the font to reflect your current usage and hover over the character you want. From there it’s either use the indicated keys – e.g. ALT+0174 gets you ® or select | copy | paste

2. If you know the key combinations then simply type them. Using the above example of ALT+0174 simply means to press and hold the ALT Key (the left hand one) whilst typing 0174 on your numeric keypad.

In an Apple Mac Environment

1. First ensure you have the “character palette” ticked on. Open up ‘system preferences’ and go to your ‘international’ options. Under there click on the ‘input menu’ tab and finally select the palette(s) you want.

After that any application that allows adding characters will present you with an ‘international flag’ in the top right of your top toolbar. Simply click that to access the palette(s).

2. The character palette can also be summoned at any time using Command-Option-T

To the best of my knowledge only some of the characters can be typed directly in the way you can in Windows – one such is my above example of ® which on a Mac is Option+R.

If you happen to be someone who spends time in both environments and are looking for a consistent approach then try popchar from Ergonis. It isn’t particularly cheap for what it is but it does work in Mac and Windows and will give you that consistent look and feel. They also do a trial version.

• do you have other ways of doing this?
• what about in a *nix environment?
• or do you not use special characters?