A word of warning about the Alt-Codes.

When you hold down the Alt key while typing a number on the NumPad, a "character number" is inserted into your document. This is a Windows thing.

While the use of character numbers to tell electronic data/text systems what character comes next is almost universal, when you use char nos in Windows, Microsoft is involved, so you know there's got to be a clinker in the process somewhere.

A few people may be aware that in olden times, IBM systems and a few others all used "ebcdic" character encoding, while "Dossy" systems used ASCII. In very simple terms, when a "document" contained a "character number," the system went to a table to look up what "character glyph" to display, and a given character number in "ebcdic" coding showed a different glyph than the same character number would show in ASCII.

A very few "old fossils" may recall that back in the days of DOS, if you wanted to use any "funny characters" you had to put ANSI.SYS in your Autoexec.bat or Config.sys files, to load the additional ANSI lookup table where character numbers from 128 thru 255 were identified.

We now have the UNICODE standard that defines character numbers from zero to "more than you'll ever need," and most systems now reflect the standardization of "character numbers" of the UNICODE system, BUT:

CLINKER NUMBER ONE: Windows will load character code pages when you boot up, but the default pages it loads depend on where you lived when you bought your version of Windows. This means that a "character number" that you insert using the Alt-NumPad method may display a different glyph on a "UK English" Windows system than on a "US English" system.

Since Microsoft designed the various character code pages that are available to Windows, they don't necessarily all "conform" to the UNICODE standard character tables. With some languages, they don't even "resemble" the UNICODE tables.

You can make limited changes to the character code pages that your system loads by selecting a different Language in your setup. It's sometimes useful to change languages in your browser if you run into a page that's got a lot of illegibles. In Internet Explorer, the Tools button in the top toolbar, Internet Options, on the General Tab, gives you a "Language" button where you can change the default. IE is supposed to look in all the char pages for all of the languages listed there if it encounters characters it doesn't recognize; but it doesn't always do a complete lookup, so changing the default (moving another language to the top of the list) sometimes helps.

Control Panel in recent Windows versions has a "Regional and Language Options" item where you can install some additional language support. It's not generally recommended that you install the options offered there unless you actually need them, since some of the stuff is "huge." You can sometimes download additional language pages from Microsoft, as I did for the "simple" Japanese ja page(s), and an individual language page or two won't overload your system.

IE sometimes will prompt you to ask if you wan't to install an unusual language that it runs into. (That's how I got the "Japanese ja" code pages on my machine.)

CLINKER NUMBER TWO: When you buy your computer, the keyboard you get probably will depend on where you buy. UK keyboards are not the same as US keyboards. As an example, UK keyboards (and other euro language keyboards) generally implement "shortcut keys" to enter the "euro" (€) sign. Shortcuts offered by UK users generally don't work on US keyboards, and may or may not work on Canadian ones - depending on whether you live in the French or English parts of the country.

Microsoft solved the "euro" problem for US users by making character code 128 print the euro. The ASCII/ANSI standards did not define a character using this number, so it was "available." So far as I know, any Windows (including Mac) system should be able to insert the "euro" using the Alt-128 character code, but it's NOT AN INTERNATIONALLY STANDARDIZED character number. It's a Microsoft "trick."

The THIRD CLINKER in all this is that character codes (or html numeric codes) are useless if you don't have a "font" loaded and in use that includes a glyph for the character that corresponds to that number. Only a few of the standard Windows fonts are "full sets." There are a couple of fonts (generally symbol/wingding or special purpose) that define as few as a dozen glyphs. If you run into a page - web or document - that has a lot of "undefined" characters, you may just need to switch to a more complete font. (Note that the "undefined" symbol is defined by the font you have loaded. It's usually a "square," but can be almost anything.)

The latest versions of Windows can insert UNICODE character numbers, but it is not recommended that you use this ability except sparingly and in special circumstances. The number of users who can't display "high number" UNICODE characters is still too high to make it a safe practice.

John