McGraw - et. al.

Using the Alt-NumPad method, here's also the "hitch" that "NumLock" must be turned on. If it's not, you may get "something" but it's unpredictable. If you put a "0" (zero) at the beginning as in Alt-0163 you get the character that maps to "163" on the "default keyboard mapping" for your Windows installation. If you omit the zero, Alt-163, you get the character from the "in use keyboard mapping." (usually - or maybe it's the other way around). For most users, the "in use" is the "default" so it doesn't make much difference, but your setup may give different characters with and without the leading zero.

Worrying about "keyboard maps" isn't usually fruitful for normal users, so try both ways, and "If it works, use it. If it doesn't, do something else."

The "leading &" is an html thing, and won't help you much for "on the machine" work. The "leading &" tells the html rendering program that what follows is a character, and the ";" tells it it's come to the end of the character. For on-machine stuff, holding the Alt key down tells the OS that "anything that comes from the NumPad is an ASCII number" until you release the Alt key.

The "real" ANSI character number for the "euro" is outside the range that the Alt-NumPad method can send simply, so on US systems, Microsoft arbitrarily mapped it to ASCII number 128 - which just happened to be an "empty/unused" number in old ASCII systems. I can't say whether Alt-0128 would work on "European" keyboards, but they use a different "keyboard map" that actually places the symbol on the keyboard.

John