Extending your characters

Every so often I realise that there's sometimes an advantage to being of that vintage who cut their PC teeth on Wordstar and remember having to refer to Windows 2.0 cheat sheets. I was working on a document with a colleague and by a trick of the keyboard a ë appeared on the screen. "How did you do that?" she asked. After a brief explanation it became clear that she had never used tools like the Windows character map or used the keypad to get the extended Latin Character Set. She was dead chuffed, having been frustrated at never being able to type café, rôle or ¾. I we;; remember my own delight a quarter of a century ago at finding I could get a proper em dash (I set the bar low where delight's concerned).

A quick straw poll of the team demonstrated a generational divide. These are the notes I put together.

The Windows Character Map

How you get to have a look at the Character Maps depends on the way the PC's set up.

• You may find it in the Start Menu: Start > Programmes > Accessories
• If not, go to Start > Run and enter the command charmap

At the top of the dialogue box for the Character Map you'll see a pull-down list of the fonts on your PC. Choose the one you're currently working in (or have a look at a few different fonts if you're just exploring).

The main body of the dialogue box is the Map itself. You'll see all the characters listed; you'll also see that at the bottom of the dialogue box there's a code for the character and its name ("U+0021: Exclamation Mark" in the example on the right). If a little box is empty it means that this font doesn't have that character.

How to select and copy a character

1. Look for the character you want
2. Click on it
3. The box containing the character will become bigger. (If you've clicked on the wrong character you can move around using your cursor keys)
4. Click on the "Select" button and you'll see this character appear in the "Characters to copy" box (see right). You can select as many characters as you want.
5. Click on the "Copy" button
6. Go back to your document, paste and the character will appear. You may need to change the size: it'll be 12pt or 13pt when it's pasted.

Character Map really becomes useful when you're looking for characters in Dingbat-type fonts.

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Using the Alt key to enter the appropriate codes for the characters

Alt plus the numbers on the keypad on the right-hand side of the keyboard gives the following:

128 Ç	129 ü	130 é	131 â	132 ä	133 à
134 å	135 ç	136 ê	137 ë	138 è	139 ï
140 î	141 ì	142 Ä	143 Å	144 É	145 æ
146 Æ	147 ô	148 ö	149 ò	150 û	151 ù
152 ÿ	153 Ö	154 Ü	155 ø	157 Ø	160 á
161 í	162 ó	163 ú	164 ñ	165 Ñ	168 ¿
173 ¡	0162 ¢	0163 £	0165 ¥	0167 §	0169 ©
0174 ®	0176 °	0177 ±	0181 µ	0182 ¶	0183 ·
0188 ¼	0189 ½	0190 ¾	0191 ¿	0150 –	0151 —
0134 †	0135 ‡	0149 •	0133 …	0137 ‰	0128 €
0153 ™	0223 ß

Specification: the importance of purpose

If I were to ask you what you could do with a stick like as not you'd quickly come up with half a dozen entirely practicable ideas. You could use it to prod cans off supermarket shelves or prop up a flower stem, You could poke a wasps' nest or hit a golf ball across the lawn. You could stir concrete or poke holes in doughnuts with it. And so on until bedtime.

But what if I asked you what a stick could do? You'd probably need to think a bit about that. Especially if I asked what a stick could do that wasn't really what you could do with a stick. It could stay where it was or it could rot or, if it were fresh off the tree, it might take root and grow. There aren't many other options as spring immediately to mind.

Like any technology, the usefulness or not of the stick is dependent on the purpose to which it is actually applied. This is why whenever we're looking at any new equipment or application the "What would you want to do with it?" question is infinitely more important than "What does it do?" It may be capable of doing very many splendid things but until somebody actually puts it to work these are only a potential usefulness. And very often the use a technology is put to isn't the one intended by the person who built it (screwdrivers weren't designed for levering the lids off tins of paint, they just happen to be very useful for doing so).

When you're building a specification or statement of user requirements you need to be mindful of the difference between describing what something will be and describing what something will do. Specifications too often describe — and prescribe — processes without describing their preferred outcomes. Which is perverse because if the object isn't to specify a physical object or deploy some sort of brand you want as much freedom of interpretation as possible. In design thinking terms you're defining the problem not building the prototype.

The purpose of specification is to define the problem to be solved. If you use the specification to define the prototype then you could be missing out on better potential solutions. Like Henry Ford might or might not have said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Taking the Edward

I think we have an early contender for Brass Neck Of The Year 2016.

Collective strength

It's National Libraries Day. I could  stand at the railings outside what this time last year was my local library, pining for services lost but I'd much rather think of positive things.

National Library Day is the date chosen for the public launch of the Greater Manchester Libraries Consortium.

The consortium's been a work in the wings for the best part of five years, three years in concrete form. The heart of the technical architecture is the library management system: we started sharing the bibliographic data three years ago and this first phase of the shared lending functions was technically live just before Christmas. It's a small but important step: customers can look at an online catalogue shared by the whole consortium — Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport and Trafford — and reserve an item from any of them.

At this stage you'll need to go to the item's "home" library to pick it up, there's a big piece of work to be done on transit logistics across the consortium but even with this caveat it's an exciting first step and it was good to see not only a big piece in the Manchester Evening News but also a very approving editorial. We don't often get high-profile hugs these days, we should enjoy them when they come along.

Strangely enough, although reservations are easily the most complicated part of the lending library operation this phase has been the easiest to implement because for all intents and purposes each authority's operation is still acting in a stand-alone basis.The next phase will require more of an integration of circulation systems and the scoping work for that is going on at the moment.

Like any decent undertaking like this we've had our fair share of stumbles and oh no moments, and one of the painful consequences of sharing a system across a consortium is the need for a fair bit of coordinating effort to get the ducks in a row ready for routine system upgrades. But there are upsides: we've built up a couple of useful support networks and the benefits have certainly extended beyond the confines of the library management system and the consortium.

And the public have a new extension to their library services and the promise of more to come.