How to Type Special Symbols Using the ALT Key

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.

Steps

Use the alt Key

1. Make certain that the Num Lock key has been pressed to activate the numeric key section of the keyboard.
2. Depress the Alt key.
3. While the Alt key is depressed, type the proper sequence of numbers (on the numeric keypad) of the ALT code from the table above.

Release the Alt key, and the character will appear.

Use the Character Map Application

1. 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
2. After choosing a font, double-click the character(s) you want.
   • Click on Copy, return to your document and paste.