Mr Bamboo's profileGreen BambooPhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
March 23 There are other ways of doing itGo on! Get into the post, you little bastard! In Entering exotic characters, Bill Poser talks about ways of getting non-standard characters into blog entries without actually mentioning charmap, which is the program that comes with Windows that lists all the fonts on your system and their characters. Hit the Windows key + r and type charmap into the box. Select Advanced view so that you can see the extra stuff, especially Group by, which is a quick way of getting to the set of characters I want. Because I installed a level of Chinese/Asian language support on my computer, I may get a few extra options that other people don't have. If I want Chinese characters, then I normally select Simplified Chinese by PinYin, which automatically takes me to the SimSun font; but if I want Greek or Cyrillic characters, then I'll choose Unicode Subrange. You can either double click on the character you want or click on the Select button. Obviously, click on Copy to, er, copy them. When you've back at your blog entry, hit ctrl+v to paste them. With characters that are part of the ASCII set, you can also insert them by using the Alt key and the numeric keypad on your keyboard. Num Lock has to be on for this to work. Let's say you want upper case A with a grave. If you click on that character, you'll see the Unicode value along with a brief description on the left at the bottom of the dialogue box, and a Keystroke value on the right-hand side. Hold down the Alt key and then type 0192 on the numeric keypad before releasing the Alt key. This basically covers accented letters such as á, à, â etc. You can see the range of these in a font if you select Windows: Western in the Character set box. Because I have cause to use some of these characters quite frequently, it's no big deal to remember the decimal value of characters so that I can add them quickly to posts. In some cases, Unicode values may be a better bet than the actual glyphs themselves. With Unicode characters, you don't need the leading 0s. For example, capital A with a macron (Ā) is U+0100, but sticking Ā in plain text HTML is enough. Curiously, when I added that character, I switched to HTML mode in LiveWriter and typed in Ā. But when I switched between modes again, HTML mode had Ā as well. Of course, the biggest problem is the more exotic characters. In other entries, I've used images when I've transcribed words using the IPA because I know that not everyone will have the Doulos SIL font or some other font containing characters specific to the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, if you can see the transcriptions of the following words, then you've got the characters stashed away somewhere on your system:
I've changed the font to Arial Unicode MS because LiveWriter was messing up the length mark in the Doulos SIL font. I was intending that you should see this – – but LiveWriter was rendering the length mark out of proportion to the rest of the font. The accented characters are nothing unusual, but as for IPA, I'll only use those on special occasions. TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://anwulf.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E60F1A35F46EF554!2592.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
|
|
|
