Part of my job is to write established brands in my copy, and a lot of those brands require the ® and ™ symbol. The program we use to input our copy isn’t Word, so in order to portray each of these symbols I have to annoyingly type the stupid code.
Now basically being computer illiterate I am wondering if there is any way that I can hotkey these symbols so instead of copying/pasting it from Word, or putting in the 4 digit code, I can just hit shift, alt, control, something like that and another letter or number and just have it automatically inserted.
Back in the days of DOS dialup freenets, there were dialer programs that allowed you to assign any block of text you wanted to each of the F-keys. I think there might still be a software package that will allow you to do that.
You want a program like text accelerator. There are others like it but I don’t know the names of those programs. Alternatively you might doing most of the entry of these symbols in one program like Word. Word has ways to configure macros which will allow you to easily do complicated things with just a few key strokes. Programers often add these sorts of macros to their editor of choice.
I guess given the answer isn’t “yeah, go to your start menu click on…” coupled with the fact that the two provided links gave me options to download something extra (something we can’t do on our work computers without approval) my answer I think is no.
All I want to do is hit control C and have it count, or his alt control r and call it a day, but without it organically being in the computer I might be SOL
The correct program for this task is autohotkey. I’ve done this exact thing with autohotkey - I have a keyboard shortcut that adds superscripts and subscript to whatever I have selected in a particular program. The program in question actually has a graphical toolbar that contains the buttons to do subscript and superscript.
When I hit the hotkey, my autohotkey script
1. Locks all keyboard and mouse movement from the user
2. Brings the window containing the toolbar to the foreground
3. Searches for the button using image recognition (I took a screenshot of the button and saved it as a png file)
4. Clicks the button
5. Unlocks keyboard and mouse movement and restores my previously selected window.
Takes about 1/5 of a second. I wrote the script in under 20 minutes starting as a neophyte user of autohotkey.
Unfortunately there is no pre-defined keystroke combo for ™ or ℠ in the International layout.
Alternatively, you can download and install the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and make your own customized layout. Using that you could modify the above International layout so that Right ALT + T = ™ and so that Right ALT + S = ℠.
As a side question, why do American English keyboards have two symbols that are impossible to use (left of the 1) because they are diacritical marks that cannot be superimposed over the other character they would modify? Instead of putting useful symbols there like degree and euro, or something.
I think these are vestigial remnants of an earlier day, before terminals were connected to computers; but even then, the choice of characters was rather idiosyncratic.
Before electronic terminals, there were mechanical Teletype machines, and before those were used as computer terminals, they were used simply to send text messages from one office to another distance office. The tilde and accent grave as well as the caret and underscore characters, were supposed to be dead keys – that is, when you typed the character, the character got printed, but the print head did not move forward a space. Then the next character would get printed in the same space.
However, I never actually saw a Teletype machine that implemented those keys that way. Teletypes also had a backspace key, but I don’t know if any of those machines actually backspaced. Go figure.
As I said, even in those days, the choice of characters was quirky. The caret character was originally an up-arrow on earlier machines, and the underscore was originally a left-arrow. I have no idea why they included a back-slash or a vertical bar character, or why the vertical bar character has a little gap in the middle. They certainly aren’t commonly-used characters, and never were (except in very specialized contexts, like computer science), and they were not used in programming languages of the day.
Maybe not built into the computer software but if you’re allowed to plug things into a USB port, and are electronics savvy, you could build a modified “Awesome” Button. I saw it originally at Make magazine but googling I saw other versions. Pressing the button sends a stream of characters into the keyboard.
We don’t have diacriticals in English. It’s there to indicate an approximation (I have ~32 teeth). It’s also used in economics to indicate substitute goods.
Zoho offers the ability to create macros. Just record keystrokes for each symbol and assign to a macro. You can assign each macro to a button you click to run. (I’ve only used Zoho’s spreadsheet so can’t give you more details on its text processor)
I don’t have neither the access nor ability to change anything that involves deep-seated settings.
I did find a workaround though that suits my needs. I figured that anything I did on the computer might not be read anyway since we use Firefox for all of our programs (don’t ask me why only Firefox, it’s just what they told me to use).
So I found an extension that allows me to put various symbols in my user bar, click on it which automatically copies it to my clipboard, and then just paste it into the text area.
It’s super easy and I’m basically an office hero for finding it
And used in URLs. [noparse]http://home.earthlink.net/[/noparse]**~**ahunter
One of the pro-Macintosh arguments we always made during the Platform Wars was that the Windows environment doesn’t give you an elegant way of typing special characters. Macs always did, via the option key.
I’ll admit those aren’t as easy to memorize as option -4 instead of shift-4 if you want ¢ instead of $, or option period instead of shift period if you want ≥ instead of > and so on, but if you used them often enough to care you’d memorize them, and they’re still a whole lot easier to remember than Alt + keypad num, keypad num, keypad num.
