A little while ago, I needed to put the spanish letter "ñ" in a word on a post and it occured to me that maybe the collection of über-geeks at Microsoft headquarters might not have considered that in South Texas we type in two languages at the same time,sometimes in the same sentence.
The little, nasty thing I use is a built-in Windows aapplet called Character Map. It is pretty handy, especially if finding special characters within applications like Word, or Excell drives you nuts. Since blogging comment boxes are devoid of nice, little things like that, you must do them externally, then paste them into the word or sentence.
To make the Character Map applet come up on a machine running anything Windows '95 or newer, do the following: Click Start, then click Run. In the little dialog box, type charmap ,then click Ok. For the ñ, look at the second line from the bottom, the fifth character from the right hand side. Click it, then click select, then click copy. The ñ is now on the clipboard, ready to be pasted into words like niño, piñata, etc.
For most windows releases, right click, then select paste.
Now, a whole new world of interesting things to do in posts is at your fingertips.
You can offer your 2¢, ask "¿Qué dijo?", even § like an attorney.
HTH
"Of course I'm geek. It is my business to geek." -The Merovingian
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Geek Speak for the Week
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3 comments:
Character Map is a life saver although a little inconvenient to search for the characters. I have used it to send E-mails in Croatian to my cousins in Croatia (Former Yugoslavia). It seems to work well since I have never had any problems with them getting the right characters on their end.
Another technique is to use ALT- numbers. Hold down the ALT key and use the keypad to type in the code for the characters you want. ALT+ 164 = ñ, for instance (of course, a comment editor is so stripped down that I had to follow your workaround to insert the ñ here). This works with the WordPress editor I use. I don't know how it will work with the Blogspot editor.
ñ <- Yep, works in blogger.
I knew about that one, but it involves memorizing the chart, or printing it out. It had also slipped my mind to write that the "alt-code' mappings are a shown on the lower right margin of the box in Character Map for future, shortcut code entry without firing up charmap.
Your advice is dead on when you have to remember just a few, or if you use a bunch of them often enough to memorize them
M.
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