For all the reasons Microsuck is going to hell, Alt+0146 is the hellishest

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@TWDuke

´ and are diacritical marks. In olden days, you would combine these with other characters to create vowels such as à or é. Computer programmers decided to assign some functionality to so now the rest of us are stuck with it taking up valuable keyboard space.
’ and " signify feet and inches or minutes and seconds. In everyday usage, they are perfectly adequate as apostrophes and quotation marks. They are sometimes referred to as typewriter apostrophe and typewriter quotes, respectively.
‘ and ’ are opening and closing single quotation marks. In the most common U.S. style, they are used to enclose a quotation within a quotation. (“He said, ‘I never want to see you again,’” she sobbed.) The closing single quotation mark doubles as an apostrophe, which signifies missing characters (e.g., the o and the 19 in “I haven’t seen hair like that since the ’80s!”). It is sometimes called the typographer’s apostrophe, and many people simply think it looks better than the straight version.

Thanks, that was actually very enlightening!

[BJMoose]

@Dead_Badger

You need to type alt+0146 - the zero is important.

So it is. So it is. This is the first I’ve heard about this group of codes. Interesting.

[Cisco]

@BJMoose

So it is. So it is. This is the first I’ve heard about this group of codes. Interesting.

Because everything is more easily accessible on the character map, unless there’s one you use enough to memorize. I actually used to have several memorized, but I’ve been on a laptop for the last 6 years, and thus cannot use them, so I’ve forgotten.

[Auntbeast]

You can’t use charmap on a laptop? or those codes? The hell?

One of my installation of windows beefs is that charmap is no longer installed by default. Seems like a silly program, until you actually need it.

[chorpler]

@seodoa

Two minus signs in a row will give you an em dash, IIRC. En dashes are not so easily written.

Two minus signs with spaces around them are converted into en dashes. Nowadays I just use ctrl-alt-[Numpad Minus] and ctrl-[Numpad Minus].

ETA: Oh, and in MS Word, you can type in a character’s unicode number and then hit alt-X to convert it to that character, I believe. Going into Insert … Symbol will let you see the codes for characters. Sadly, for characters like ’, you still have to use the Alt method.

[chorpler]

Er, actually, for characters like ’ and “ in Word, evidently you can either do the unicode and alt-X trick, or you can do ctrl-, for ‘, ctrl-’,’ for ’, ctrl-`," for “, and ctrl-’," for ”. Interesting.

[Nava]

@Auntbeast

You can’t use charmap on a laptop? or those codes? The hell?

Yes you can, but no numeric keypad.

I’m having to use the codes for ñ and Ñ on my work desktop: no permissions to change the keyboard’s language, the guys from IT don’t have permission to give me the permissions (it’s either “user” or “admin” profiles) and we have to write docs in Spanish. Design docs. That’s documentación de diseño… :smack:

At least Brit keyboards have a way to type áéíóú. But the ñ is hidden under some complicated sequence like “type these three keys followed by these two.” UGH!

[Hunter_Hawk]

@Nava

no permissions to change the keyboard’s language, the guys from IT don’t have permission to give me the permissions (it’s either “user” or “admin” profiles) and we have to write docs in Spanish. Design docs.

Hmm…are you at least able to record macros? I wonder if you might be able to create one to insert the appropriate character.