A while back I had a site bookmarked that had all the alternate characters you can get by holding down the Alt key and typing numbers. The chart went on for pages and pages, and it even had Chinese characters. Apparently these won’t show up on everyone’s computer, but they worked on ours and I’d like to find the chart again for a project I’m working on. I’m looking on Google but so far can’t find what I’m looking for. Can anyone help me out?
I think you’re looking for a unicode character table. Plug that into Google and see what you get.
I think it’s related to the font you’re using. If you’re using Windows, you should be able to bring the Character Map. There you’ll be able to bring up the fonts on you have stored on your computer. Left click on the character you want and the Alt combo will appear in the lower right hand of the window. If you want other character sets, just Google for “fonts”.
I found a unicode chart but that definitely wasn’t it (and I have no idea how to use it).
Windows has a Character Map feature which you should find under START | PROGRAMS | ACCESSORIES. It’s an optional component so it won’t necessarily be on every Windows PC that you use, but it’s trivial to install if it’s missing.
Here’s one, but it’s only a couple pages long:
http://www.ramsch.org/martin/uni/fmi-hp/iso8859-1.html
These fine folks will send you a free poster of the IBM Character Codes. If you type “alt” and then the decimal code, you’ll get the character.
http://www.copydisks.com/conversion_services.htm
I’ve gotten one from them. It takes a while to get here, but I like it.
I don’t know if this is what you are looking for but according to UB it’s the whole thing.
On my computer it’s actually under Start-Programs-Accessories-System Tools.
What you will find is that the original ASCII characters went from code 0 to 127 (really 32 to 127). The extended ASCII or ANSI codes continue to 255, the limit of what is possible using single bit. This didn’t fly well with folks in, say Thailand, nor even for some Europeans. A more comprehensive solution was sought, and Unicode came into being. It uses two bits for each character, so you’re limited not to 256 (2^8) characters, but 65536 (2^16).
Pan European code (more obscure characters, like an omega with an accent, in Unicode)
Cherokee, Mongolian, and more Unicode goodies can be found at Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources.
Since so much software is in place using the old format, the original ASCII codes have been left untouched. But protocols were established to map the newer ANSI codes (in theory 128-255, but usually just 160-255) to various Unicode pages.
It is these code pages that you are looking for.
Here are a few of the early character sets. Note that the charts go from A0 to FF. These are hexadecimal numbers (you can see the more familiar digits used in the third chart, but the 83 is actually 131 in decimal). To use them with your Alt key you’ll need to convert them to decimal, so that FF will be 255. Once you’re comfortable converting the hex to dec numbers, you should have no problem producing any of the single bit characters with your Alt key. Actually seeing them in a given language may be a different story, depending on what program you’re using.