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