Ascii-code

How do you type ® or a ©, or € or letters with accents, umlauts, cedillas and so on? When you press a key on your computer keyboard, it sends a number to the computer rather than a letter, because computers don't understand human language. Sending an "A" would mean nothing to your machine, regardless of whether it was a PC or a Mac or whether it was running Windows or Linux or OSX or whatever operating system you might choose. So, once upon a time, the problem was, how do we tell any computer, regardless of what it is, what the keys on the keyboard are? And the (rather long-winded) solution was the "American Code for Information Interchange", otherwise and thankfully shortened to "ASCII". This converted all the keys on your average keyboard into numbers that the computer could understand. But this wasn't enough - there were different currency symbols depending on what country you were in, there were registered trade marks and copyright symbols and all sorts of bits and pieces that a keyboard didn't have to start with. So the ASCII code was extended, producing - wait for it - the Extended ASCII code. Now, people could put an ® into their text, or a ©, or even a €. Impressive, huh? That's what this page is about, and it's what enables me to talk about açaí berries with the correct accents on the letters. (Notebook and laptop users, please scroll down to here **** first. If you don't have Windows or you don't have a PC, please scroll down to here ***) The codes are shown in several different formats, but the only one that will concern most people is the number on the left hand side of the table. That's the actual number generated when you press a key. So, for example, if you find number 65 in the table, that's the number the computer sees when you press the A key with the shift key held down - capital A. A small "a" is number 97. Are you with me so far? Great. Now then, there are also symbols such as ® which aren't on your keyboard at all. Go down the list and find the ® symbol, it's number 174. There is no key on your keyboard to type this, but there's a clever way to get it into your text anyway: first make sure your number pad is set to enter numbers - in Windows the "Num Lock" key must be pressed and the Num Lock light must be lit. Mac users... er... look it up in your manual, sorry guys. Next (and again for Windows) hold down your ALT key, which is generally next to the spacebar. Keep this held down, and then, on the number keypad - not on the numbers above the letters on the main part of the keyboard - type 0, 1, 7, and then 4 and then release the ALT key. You should get a ® symbol. Fantastic! Now you're empowered to insert any symbol, currency, foreign character, accent or indeed anything else included in the extended ASCII code into all your postings! The rule (again, for Windows with a standard keyboard) is to look up the number of the symbol or whatever you want to type, add a zero on the front end, and then type that while holding an ALT key down. For example, character 64 is an@, which you can type by holding down the ALT key and typing 0, 6, 4 on your numeric keypad. Got it? Yes, I know this symbol is already on your keyboard, I wanted to demonstrate that everything has a number. If you want to put a copyright symbol in your text, then you need to look up the number of the © symbol, which is 169. Or 0169, for our purposes. Start a posting, or open a text editor such as the Windows Notepad program, and then, while holding down the ALT key, type 0, 1, 6, 9 on the numeric keypad. You should get a © symbol. If you don't, and instead utterly weird things happen, then you haven't turned the "num lock" key on, so the keypad isn't sending numbers the way it's supposed to. Check if there is a light on above your keypad. If not, try pressing the Num Lock key, which is generally at the top left of the keypad. This is a very useful thing to know and sets you apart from the crowd when, for example, you have a USA keyboard but still need to use the £ sign (ALT+0163). Or if you need to add a trademark to your work. Once you've got the idea, you can handle symbols and accents easily even if your keyboard doesn't have them. Which is pretty cool, as a matter of fact. [EDIT -----------------------------] I forgot to mention, if you've got Windows XP you can go to the START menu and then All Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Character Map and there's a very extensive list of both ASCII character sets and all manner of extended character sets even including Arabic. These aren't strictly ASCII codes as they fall outside of the range, and have subsequently been given numbers - sometimes very long ones - so that you can, for example, add Arabic letters into an English text. Vista users, if there are any left, go to the Accessories folder and then the System Tools folder. Wins 7 users, let me know. To use the map, you find your character and then just drag it into a selection box. You can create whole words this way. You can even select the font and the size. This is terrific but of course MS had to make it stupidly hard to access. Even my Microsoft keyboard, which has a special function key for the Windows Calculator, doesn't have one for the equally useful Character Map. So if you're going to be using this a lot, the best thing to do is to add it to your Quick Launch toolbar and your desktop. To do this, first make sure your Quick Launch toolbar is on. Right-click on the toolbar, select "toolbars" from the mouse menu, and make sure "quick launch" is ticked. It will probably be on the left hand side of the main toolbar, though not necessarily. Now open the Start menu and go to Accessories and then System tools, and when you get to the menu that contains "Character Map", right-click over that and drag to the desktop. Release, and select "copy" from the menu. You should now have a desktop icon for the character map. Now right-click on this and drag it down to the Quick Launch toolbar, release, and select Copy again. Now you should have an icon which launches the utility from the toolbar and is always accessible even if you can't see the desktop. [END EDIT ------------------------------------] *** If you don't have Windows or you don't have a PC then you'll need to consult your user manual or look online to see how you generate ASCII characters with your keyboard. If you send me a message, I'll be happy to include that information here. **** NOTEBOOK and LAPTOP users please note, none of this may work for you unless you have a dedicated number pad on your keyboard. You may have to enable your numbers with a function key, and there's even a possibility that you can't do this at all without buying a USB number pad. That's the price you pay for looking cool with a tiny computer. [EDIT: The tips for using the Windows Character Map work, though, and may be your best option.]