Typing special characters on computers


Letter 	                PC shortcut 	Mac shortcut
é (as in Sinéad) 	Alt+0233 	Option+e, e
è (as in fève) 	        Alt+0232 	Option+`, e
à (as in voilà) 	Alt+0224 	Option+`, a
ô (as in bientôt) 	Alt+0244 	Option+i, o
ï (as in naïve) 	Alt+0239 	Option+u, i
ç (as in leçon) 	Alt+0231 	Option+c

The above table was blatantly plagiarized from someone who I am not going to reference. What the hell does Alt+0233 mean? How do I type these into the browser window? It does not work in firefox, It does not work in ie. It does work in wordpad but not in AbiWord. I will have to break out the work laptop and see if it works in word.

Other web sites suggest ctrl+’,i to get í. Again this seem to work with some microsoft things but not others.

For the record if all these accented or otherwise adulterated characters show up correctly as they do in my browser they were all cut and pasted either from the unmentioned website or from WordPad.

In short how the hell can I accent things with élan? Or is that èlan?

Alt+0223:

Hold down the ALT key and on the NUMBER pad, not the numbers across the top of your keyboard, type 0223. When the ALT key is released, the character will appear. It should work almost anywhere.

Let us know if it works.

The ctrl-'i thing is indeed specific to Microsoft Office AFAIK. Another Office-specific one that’s useful in a small handful of languages is:

ctrl-shift-~ n

which should give you the Spanish letter eñe* which I think is also used sparingly in Portuguese, but I really wouldn’t know. Anyway, there you go.

  • Alt+0241, btw.

Rico, thanks for the prompt reply. Sadly this did not work. It worked in IE, Eudora etc, but not firefox. Goddamn open source crap. The é appeared in the google toolbar text window. If I turn off the google toolbar it does not appear anywhere.

fetus, thanks for you reply. Saldy again it looks like every thing but firefox and ie works with you suggestion.

íìï and even â ctrl+’`:^ letting go then the letter works in all places but firefox and ie.

Enough browser bashing. How bought that blond furry crayfish?

Works for me on Firefox: éèàôïçñ

The whole series from Alt+0128 to Alt+0255:
€ƒ„…†‡‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©«¬®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿
ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÏÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖרÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûü²þÿ

Make sure NUM LOCK key = “on.”

I’m long accustomed to typing special characters that way using Unicode, but now that foreign writing systems are easily accessible on today’s systems thanks to Unicode, I can never memorize all the codes to type.

So I just use Character Map. That’s how I was able to post in Sanskrit Devanagari for the first time just now. Character Map rocks now that it’s Unicode-enabled!

Well what’s up with that? It does not work for me. On my home coputer.

It does not work from my work laptop. Perhaps I should fire up the alternate top secrete backup window 2000 computer or my wife’s laptop. Perhaps my dog’s phsycic energy is messing with things? Grendel stop that!

I’m biting my tongue, to keep from suggesting that you get a . . . you know, the “M-word.”

(hee-hee)

é how about that. I uninstalled the google toolbar and things started wroking. Google must have screwed up and set the do evil bit, bastards. Thanks for all the help guys. I did fire up the wife’s laptop where I don’t install this sort of stuff and it worked with IE. €‚ƒ„à…†#ÿàßÖ look at them things.± thats a good one.

What windows Millenium Edition?

There is a windows-friendly freeware program called Allchars which enables the ctrl-a-’ > á (etc.) I use it and recommend it. I’m not sure whether linking to the homepage would constitute disallowed promotions but google and ye shall find.

é ö ï ì pretty cool it works with google toolbar installed. I think there is no problem in directly linking to a website that directly addresses the question.

Or you could set the keyboard to US-International, which is what I have done.

It acts similarly to AllChars (from a cursory reading about that, anyway) but it doesn’t require the Ctrl key to be pressed first.

See here, here, or here.

Oh, and I should have added that for me, this is the éà§ïêst way to tÿþé all §ôrts of àçÇeñtêð characters. It comes in really handy when I have to type quite a bit in Spanish.

This question pops up every few months or so.
Anyway, here is a special character chart:
http://www.1728.com/altchar.htm
which is on my website.

For those having trouble with special characters, remember to use the number keypad and not the numbers that are above the “QWERTYUIOP” row on the keyboard.

Looking into this some more I found

http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/02/google-toolbar-keyboard-tips.html

This messes up trying to type the alt characters into browser fields.

What’s the shortcut for infinity or sqrt? Alt+236 or Alt+252 don’t seem to work for me.

This website (the virtual keyboard) http://www.gate2home.com/?lang=he&sec=2
comes in handy if you want to type in a certain language. You choose a language from the drop-down and you will see displayed on the screen a standard keyboard layout for that language. Helps when you want to type short amounts of text in a different language.

I have used it successfully on my Windows XP system at work, but not on my Macintosh (OS X 10.4) at home.