Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows XP Professional (3rd Edition)

Character Map is a utility program that lets you examine every character in a given font and choose and easily insert into your documents special characters, such as trademark (™ and ®) and copyright symbols (©), foreign currency symbols and accented letters (such as ¥) and nonalphabetic symbols (such as fractions, ¾), DOS line-drawing characters (+), items from specialized fonts such as Symbol and Wingdings, or the common arrow symbols (, , , and ). Some fonts include characters not mapped to the keyboard. Character Map lets you choose them, too, from its graphical display. The Program Map displays Unicode, DOS, and Windows fonts characters.

Character Map for Windows XP Professional is larger and updated from the one in Windows 98. Now you can choose the character set, rearrange the items in a font (such as grouping all currency types together) to eliminate hunting, and search for a given character.

Character Map works through the Windows Clipboard. You simply choose a character you want to use, click Copy, and it moves onto the Clipboard. Switch to your destination application (typically a word processing file), position the cursor, and choose Paste.

Using Character Map

To run Character Map, follow these steps:

1.

Choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Character Map. When the window appears, check the Advanced View box to see more. The window then appears with all the characters included in the currently selected font displayed.

2.

Choose the font you want to work with from the Font list.

3.

By default, the Character Set is Unicode. This means all the characters necessary for most of the world's languages are displayed. To narrow down the selection, choose a language from the drop-down list.

4.

To examine an individual character, click a character box, and hold down the mouse button to magnify it. You can accomplish the same thing with the keyboard by moving to the character using the arrow keys (see Figure 5.8).

Figure 5.8. Character Map with Advanced options showing. You can double-click a character to put it in the copy list.

5.

Double-click a character to select it, transferring it to the Characters to Copy box. Alternatively, after you've highlighted a character, you can click the Select button or press Alt+S to place it in the Characters to Copy box. You can keep adding characters to the copy box if you want to paste several into your document at once.

6.

Click the Copy button to place everything from the Characters to Copy box onto the Windows Clipboard.

7.

Switch to your destination application, and use the Paste command (typically on the application's Edit menu) to insert the characters into your document. In some cases, you might then have to select the inserted characters and format them in the correct font, or the characters won't appear as you expected. You can, of course, change the size and style as you like.

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If you know the Unicode number of the item to which you want to jump, type it into the Go to Unicode field. The display scrolls as necessary, and the desired character is then highlighted, ready for copying.

Choosing from a Unicode Subrange

A useful feature of Character Map lets you choose a subrange from the Unicode. Unicode was designed intelligently with characters grouped in sets. You can choose a subset of a font's characters to help you locate a specific symbol. To check out this feature, open the Group By list, and choose Unicode Subrange. When you choose this option, a box like the one in Figure 5.9 pops up.

Figure 5.9. Choosing a subset of a font from which to select a character.

Click the subgroup that you think will contain the character you're looking for. Good examples are currency or arrows. Make sure to open the Group By list again, and choose All when you want to see all the characters again.

Entering Alternative Characters from the Keyboard

At the bottom right side of the Character Map dialog box is a line that reads

Keystroke:

For nonkeyboard keys (typically, in English, anything past the ~ character), clicking a character reveals a code on this linefor example, Alt+1060. This line tells you the code you can enter from the keyboard to quickly pop this character into a document. Of course, you must be using the font in question. For example, say you want to enter the registered trademark symbol (®) into a Windows application document. Note that with a standard text font such as Arial or Times New Roman selected in Character Map, the program lists the keystrokes for this symbol as Alt+0174. Here's how to enter the character from the keyboard:

1.

Press Num Lock to turn on the numeric keypad on your keyboard (the Num Lock light should be on).

2.

Press and hold Alt, and then press 0+1+7+4 (that is, type the 0, 1, 7, and 4 keys individually, in succession) on the number pad. (You must use the number pad keys, not the standard number keys. On a laptop, you must activate the number pad using whatever special function key arrangement your laptop uses.) When you release the Alt key, the registered trademark symbol should appear in the document.

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Not all programs accept input this way. If this approach doesn't work with a program, you'll have to resort to the standard means of putting characters into the Clipboard explained previously.

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