ALS 3203 - Lesson 4
Producing Special Characters Using "Charmap"
You may want to use special characters to improve the professional appearance of your word processing document, and to save white space. The days of using 1/2 to repesent one-half should now be over, for this and many other characters may be inserted in your word processing document (if you know how). This knowledge lends a nice appearance to a document, and shows the reader that you have advanced word processing skills. Who knows, this may lead to a job offer. For example, there are characters for the degree sign, some fractions, copyright, trademark, plus-minus, and many others (see below). All you need to know to do this is contained here. Just remember that as in all documents, the action and reaction occurs where your cursor is!
Within Windows Special Characters are created with an ANSI 4 digit numerical code (This depends on your Windows version. Windows XP and 2000 may show hexadecimal character codes instead of decimal codes VISTA may be diffferent from either of these. If you see something like 0xA3 instead of 0163, go to the website at http://www.transonline.no/dec2hex2.htm for a conversion chart). For PC users of Windows, a combination of alt and a 4-digit numeric combination (with NUMLOCK ON)produces the desired special character. MacIntosh users use a slightly different technique. Special characters are accessed through the Apple Menu - Key Caps choice. Shown below is a small portion of a character map for Windows Arial typeface. The first character © is produced by the alt 0169 code which must be typed on the numeric keypad to work. NUM LOCK must be on! Move your mouse over these characters and the resulting ANSI keystrokes should be displayed.
ON A PC, To see a complete Windows XP ANSI typeface character set type "Charmap" in the Start, Run, Windows menu. OR, Start, Programs, Accessoires, System Tools, Character Map. When you get the Character map, if you use Windows XP, choose Advanced View and for character set, choose Windows Western. Then, you should see the keystroke values (lower right hand corner)for each character, as well as the Unicode values (lower left hand corner). Pick a typeface from the drop down menu.
You should see something similar to the image below.
Not all typefaces will have the same available characters . Changing typeface may result in characters being mapped to the same numeric value but resulting in a different character being displayed. For example, alt 0169 produces © for Arial typeface, but produces a heart in the Symbol typeface.
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