Popular Threads on Solosez
Of § & ¶ Signs, Diacritical Marks and Other Neat Symbols
I have been a Mac user since the early 90's and never had a problem finding characters. I frequently write in French and I type them as I go. But, where is the symbol for the Euro?
Lynne R. Ostfeld, Chicago, Illinois
One of the more unsung advantages of Mac v. Windows is the use of extended character sets. It's always been (well, at least as far back as I can remember) that one could type such characters in any application. For example § is option-6. It used to be that finding the key combination meant looking through the whole font and remembering the keystroke. Then someone wrote a little extension (popchar) that would pop up a list of all characters in any font when clicking on a hot corner. That functionality has since been written into the OS, so all I gotta do is go to the pane in the upper right and choose either the keyboard viewer or character palette and pick any non-standard character I want. Oh well, enjoy your cryptic multiple key commands for now, eventually MS will steal this from Apple and you'll get something similar.
Steve O'Donnell
Keyboard viewer and Character Palette are in System Preferences->International->Input Menu. The Euro symbol is shift-option-2.
Steve O'Donnell
You have the option in Word (regardless of operating system!) to customize the symbols you use the most--When in word, go into insert, symbol, and when the screen comes up, find the symbol you want. It will give you the shortcut that has been preprogrammed, but if you click on the shortcut key, it will give you a screen allowing you to customize it so you don't have to remember numbers to use w/ the alt key. My section symbol is now "alt s" and since I'm a pretty fast typist until I have to use numbers, it saves me a lot of time. Hope this helps.
Madeleine B. Bass
You can also hotkey the symbols. For instance, I have made Alt S the section symbol and Alt p the paragraph symbol.
Robert W. "Robby" Hughes, Jr., Stone Mountain, Georgia
I've always used ALT 21 for a section symbol (§) and ALT 20 for a paragraph symbol (¶).
Neal A. Kennedy, Marble Falls, Texas
Isn't an alternative to use WordPerfect? Lol
Alan P. Bernstein
Didja ever get frustrated when you were in a Windows-based application (such as a billing program or an online service that wasn’t Word based), but you just couldn’t find a way to insert a special symbol or foreign diacritic mark, such as the cedilla of façade or the acute accent of resumé? Well, if so my friends, have I got the site for you!
A few weeks ago, some solosezzer kindly pointed out how you could create the § symbol on any Windows-based program by turning “Num Lock” on and, while depressing the alt key, typing in 0167 before releasing the alt key. Voilà! Whomever you were, please identify yourself because you certainly deserve a bow. In any event, I figured if you could do that for a section symbol, there’s probably a way to create a ¶ as well. So, I asked my computer technician and now share with you the wonderful world of Windows Al Key Codes taken from a Penn State website entitled Computing with Foreign Symbols, Accents and Foreign Scripts. Click on the following url and be transported to a world of all kinds of funny looking stuff.
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html
Robert A. Merring
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