Practical methods for typing unfamiliar characters
- Back to the paper: “Letters and characters: Towards a standard“
Most computer keyboards supplied in the English-speaking world have the 26 letters A – Z, upper and lower case, without diacritics, and no more. If then one is faced with having to record a name or expression which does contain letters for which the keyboard does not cater or a letter bearing a diacritic, what can be done?
ANSI codes: Alt+number
If you do not have a customised keyboard or other quick way of doing it, distinct and accented letters can be typed using Alt+{number).
Example: Plain letters and ligatures beyond the familiar 26
(The figure must be as typed, including any leading zero.)
- Alt+231 þ
- Alt+232 Þ
- Alt+208 ð
- Alt+209 Ð
- Alt+145 æ
- Alt+146 Æ
- Alt+0156 œ
- Alt+0140 Œ
Analysis:
Having to remember a long list of unrelated, indistinct codes just to type letters of this sort is impractical and likely to drive the user to despair.
Customising your keyboard with Macintosh OS X
For users of Macintosh OS X, you can place a custom-made keyboard layout into your
- Library > Keyboard Layouts folder,
and then activate it by choosing your chosen keyboard name under your
- System Preferences > International menu after restarting.
Autocorrects
An alternative, to avoid messing ones keyboard settings up, is to programme a series of “Autocorrect” options. These must be such that they will not be triggered accidentally while typing something else, and an office standard must be adopted so that a user does not have to learn them afresh when moved to a new work station. The autocorrects must also be intuitive.
Once a system of autocorrects has been programmed, it can be added to any computer in the office with a macro, possibly one embedded in a document available on the network or a routine disseminated across the network.
I find the “#” symbol is useful for these autocorrections and it is a symbols which has very little use otherwise. For example: The following examples of autocorrections are suggested:
- th# þ
- dh# ð
- a’# á
- a^# â
- a`# à
- a”# ä
- ae# æ
- ao# å
- a~# ã
- c,# ç
- o/# ø
– and so forth.
This system can be expanded to cover other alphabets (alpha# α ; beta# β etc) but this would only be useful for adding occasional letters, not actually writing in those languages, for which an appropriate keyboard should be used.
Analysis:
Autocorrections are a neat and simple way to allow a user to type any accented letter, if the appropriate autocorrections are all programmed in beforehand, which can be done with a macro.
Letters required for full Latin-alphabet linguistic coverage
- See also the, Summary Appendix.