Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Special characters

This post is in response to a comment from a previous post.

I'm not sure how to get the ö character, aside from doing the ALT+#### method. (ALT+0246, in this case.) Some programs have special key combinations you can use to enter these types of characters, but I looked and couldn't find anything for MSN. (Not that that means anything - MSN's help is pretty shoddy.)

The most common character I use via the ALT+#### method is é, which is ALT+0233. In fact, this is the only one I have memorized, because it's the only one I use regularly.

(For those of you who don't know what Kathryn and I are talking about, open Notepad, make sure your Num Lock is on, hold the Alt key, then press and release the 0 on the keypad, press and release the 2, press and release the 3, and press and release the 3 again. Then release the Alt key; the character é should appear. Make sure you use the keypad, not the numbers across the top of the keyboard.)

On Windows, you can look for the Character Map program (Usually Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Character Map.) When you select any of the characters in there, at the bottom of the window it will tell you the ALT+#### combination to get it (if any).

Otherwise, I would do a search on Google for "special characters", and see what comes up. There are probably lots of sites that will give tables of special characters, especially since MSN users have this annoying habit of using the characters inappropriately, just because they think it looks cool, which just goes to emphasize their ignorance. My name is "serna", not "§éŖñà".

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yipeee! I love characters lol, I use é alot too. Same with me, it's the only one I memorized. Now im gonna go have fun with it, thanks serna! :-D