Western English language based computer systems, including much of the Internet, use a particular character set known as US-ASCII or simply ASCII, which may or may not the contain characters you need. Recently, this 'default" character set has been supplanted by the ISO 1 character set that contains more foreign phrase glyphs (individual characters). For use on a computer, character sets are encoded and set in a table where a positive number is assigned to each character, or glyph. Typically, a character set includes far more characters than you will use in the course of normal writing. You can access these "hidden" characters by using a modifier key, most commonly the alt key. Within a given character set standard, there can be many fonts and font families, and while all fonts are supposed to have all the characters from a given set, many do not, or are inaccurate, thus your results may vary depending on the font you are using.
- Make certain that the Num Lock key has been pressed to activate the numeric key section of the keyboard.
- Depress the Alt key.
- While the Alt key is depressed, type the proper sequence of numbers (on the numeric keypad) of the ALT code from the table above.
Use the Character Map Application
- On Windows machines, you can also access these special characters, the ones that are four numerals long anyway, using the Character Map utility.
- Click on the Windows Start menu, on the lower left of your screen to open the map utility.
- Select Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Character Map
- After choosing a font, double-click the character(s) you want.
- Click on Copy, return to your document and paste.