My old Dell laptop used to have a special key that you pressed to switch certain of the regular keys to being a numpad. Do any of your letter keys have little numbers written on them in funny colours and in funny places?
hey, the top row of numbers doesn’t work. not very consistent.
I was in school in Hong Kong in the 80s. I understood the dot in the middle as the old-fashioned way of writing the decimal point. I have seen them in some books, but it was not common.
Another peculiarity was that some older publications used the letter I (capital i, in serif font) instead of the digit 1, supposedly because some typewriters did not have the digit 1. Has anyone else seen that elsewhere?
On my laptop, when I have the “number pad” like that set to on, I also can’t get ALT0183 to work.
Yeah, I see that. I’d have to dig up the instructions as to how to turn it on, and it’s probably not something I’d use very often.
Oh hey, I see how it works! ·
I’ve seen typewriters without a figure 1 key. In many old documents you’d see the lower-case L – l used for 1. I’ve never seen the I used like that.
The standard way of typing a number 1 on a typewriter was to use a lowercase L (l).
You also typed a period “.” and then backspaced and typed a single quote/apostrophe “’” to make an exclamation point.
If you saw the 1 typeset as an I in a publication, it may have just been a peculiarity in the font…or it may have been intentionally done. I’ve seen that in some old books.
Yep, to wit:
1984
l984
I984
The first uses the numeral one. The second uses the lowercase L. The third uses uppercase I. The last looks very odd to me in a typewriter typeface.
When laying out type in something that has text figures (these are figures that have ascenders and descenders like most letters in ordinary typefaces), you will often find a numeral one that looks similar to a capital I. (As you also note.)
Gentle Original Poster …
When asking a question, it would greatly increase the quality of the responses if you shared with others where the heck you live (countrywise) in your original post.
Actually, I don’t think this “gentle suggestion” was warranted in this case. It seems to me that in this case there was sufficient detail in the OP to convey to all of us that he wasn’t talking about the same decimal point/period that Americans are used to. It seems especially rich since American posters here fel free to assume that everyone shares teh same assumptions that we do (for one, I think we ought to ban two-letter state abbreviations on any international forum).
Awfully snarky post to drop in long after the question has been resolved.
Especially since it took Crafter_Man all of two minutes to figure out what he was asking and post an answer.
A quicker way than gazpacho mentioned, but still not as quick as making a shortcut:
Hold down the Windows key and press “r”
Type “charmap” into the run dialog box
Hit Enter
This works for all sorts of other stuff too… notepad, calc, iexplore etc…
Press Num Lock, then Alt 0176
You will then get a °
ALT+7 for a big fat one •
ALT+0183 for a tiny one ·
I have to use these all the time.