Summary: There are literally thousands of different characters; many more than would fit on a keyboard. There's an approach to type the less common ones.
Can you tell me how to access the many odd characters and fractions etc. that are available? I used to know how but forgot. I remember it had to use a combination of numbers or characters to access them.
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Sure. It's actually pretty simple, and very easy to do.
The problem is that many of the codes you might type in may not display the same character in all places. In most, cases the set of characters is fairly consistent, but you might run into a case or two where what you see is not what you expect.
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The "how" is easy:
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Depending on your keyboard, you may need to make sure that Num Lock is selected to enable the numeric keypad.
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Hold down the ALT key.
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On the numeric pad, type the numeric code for the character you want to insert.
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Release the ALT key.
That's it! It should now have "typed" a single character corresponding to the code you entered.
So I can guess the next question: how do you figure out what codes to use?
If you search for "alt codes" you'll get links to several lists. Here's one useful one.
I'll throw out a few examples as well, though:
| Code | Character | HTML |
| 0128 | € | € |
| 0153 | ™ | ™ |
| 0169 | © | © |
| 0174 | ® | ® |
| 0178 | ² | ² |
| 0189 | ½ | ½ |
A few points about the list:
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The leading zero is important. ALT+0153 and ALT+153 are two completely different characters.
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This is actually a Windows keyboard standard - meaning that the characters displayed might be different if a different character encoding is being used.
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I've included an "HTML" column above that shows the proper HTML special character encoding that you should use if you are writing HTML to ensure that the characters are displayed properly across as many platforms as possible (though even then, some less common characters are sometimes not available everywhere).
Another tool to play with, if you're interested in special characters, is the Windows "charmap" utility. Click on Start, then Run and type in "charmap" and press OK. In this utility you can select individual characters from any font installed on your machine, and then copy then to the clipboard for pasting into whatever application you choose.
All in all it's useful stuff, and besides typing in special characters into your word processing documents, these techniques can often be used to liven up your IM messages, Twitter tweets and more.
Related:
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Why do I get odd characters instead of quotes in my documents? The way characters are represented within computer documents and email isn't always the same everywhere, and things often get misinterpreted.
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Why does my email sometimes show up with funny characters like "=0D" in it?
Article C3884 - October 3, 2009
"Character Map" -- CharMap.EXE -- is located within your "C:\WINDOWS\System32" directory (or "folder" to use Microsoft-speak). I place a shortcut to it on my (classic view) Start Menu, so that it's immediately available if I need it.
Be aware that using CharMap does have two very distinct disadvantages:
First, to be used correctly, you need to switch it to whatever font you happen to be writing/editing in at the moment, which -- on a system with a couple of hundred fonts on it -- can be rather time consuming!
And Second, after selecting the correct font, you do need to (tediously) peruse the table of characters to hunt out the character you need -- which may (or may not!) be a hunt in vain, since not every font has every available character. If you happen to be using a font which omits the character you need, you're out of luck -- all you can do is switch to some other, more complete, font!
Still, if the latter's the case, CharMap's your quickest and most definitive way of finding that out! And if you don't want to mess around with memorizing "ALT" codes, CharMap's "point-&-click" interface can't be beat. :)
Posted by: Glenn P. at October 11, 2009 12:18 AMIn Windows XP some of the more common characters like accents (é), ¢, tilde (ñ), section (§), etc. can be more intuitvely key-struck by setting your keyboard to "United States-International".
Go to the Regional and Language Options control panel, click Details on the Languages tab, and on the Settings tab you should be able to select or add this keyboard in the Installed services window.
After a little trial and error you can find and strike most of these characters using the ALT key on the right-hand side and the letter that most resembles the character. You may need to add the SHIFT key as well. For example I get the section symbol (§) by hitting RightALT-SHIFT-S.
Posted by: Tom Abisalih at October 13, 2009 9:19 AMThanks Leo your articles are all so informative. May I ask how about the combination keys for a peso sign, thanks again...
Posted by: jojo villaluz at October 14, 2009 4:57 PMi typed ALT 0128 and got some weird character like a piece of a corner. i was in an AOL email. but when i type it here it shows properly. €
Posted by: linda larkin at October 17, 2009 8:42 AMHi!! i need some help... May i ask the combination code of philippine peso sign in keyboard using microsoft word... thank you...
Posted by: Anne Ramirez at November 23, 2009 10:25 PM