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How can I type Special Characters? |
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Date: |
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08/17/2002 |
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Source: |
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Allied Computing |
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Author: |
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Calvin Hill |
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Type: |
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Tip |
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So you want to be able to type spcial charachers like:
® © ? ? ? ? ¶ ¢ ¿
You need to use Key Caps!
You'll find it under the Apple Menu on OS 9 and earlier and in the Utilities folder (in the Applications folder) under OS X. First open your word processor and pick a font. Now open Key Caps and choose the same font from the Font Menu. Key Caps shows you a text area and a simulation of a computer keyboard.
With the Arial font selected under OS X, the window looks like this:
Press down the Shift key and see how the keyboard now changes the letters to upper case. Now try holding down the Option key instead of the Shift key and you'll see various interesting characters appear. See sample below:
If I hold down Option and Shift this changes again. Some uppercase letters appear and some symbols change completely. See sample below:
If I now change to another font such as Geneva results are similar but not identical. There are several special fonts too. Try out Wingdings, Webdings or Zapf Dingbats if you have them. Now you'll find a wonderful array of trucks and rocketships, arrows and curlicues, speech bubbles, snowflakes and more.
For example:" : U k z µ
To use these characters note which key combination produces the one you want and go back to your wordprocessor. Change the font and type the key combination. Some characters will look better at a different size too. Now you can happily print your document and all should be well.
Don't try doing this in the body of an email though, unless it's as an experiment as there are enormous complexities in how different computers handle such things. It also might not work so well if you'll be sending the wordprocessing document to another person (for example as an email attachment). By all means, give it a try, but don't rely on it. |
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