FrKeys XP

3 Choosing accents

3.3 The More Characters window

This window allows you to select from the 1000s of characters that are available. You can select characters in a variety of ways—by their name, by what they look like, by choosing a base letter and accents, or (if you know it) by entering the character’s code.

To display the More Characters window, click on the ‘More…’ button in the Change Characters window.

At the top of the window are the following elements:

Character

This shows a large version of the character that is currently selected. You can double-click on this character to display a list of the fonts that contain this character.

Character name

This displays the Unicode name of the character that is currently selected (for example, “Latin Small Letter E With Acute”).

Character code

For characters that are part of the basic Windows character set, this displays the character’s code. If the character is a Unicode-only character, a message is displayed to this effect. Some older applications may not be able to handle Unicode-only characters.

Unicode position

This displays the character’s Unicode code point. If you need to describe a specific character to someone, this is a good, unambiguous way to refer to it.

‘Character not in font’ message

A message is displayed if the character that is currently selected does not exist in the current font. If this is the case, the character may not display correctly—though sometimes Windows will substitute the correct character from another font instead. If the character does not display correctly, choose a different font. You can discover which fonts contain the character by double-clicking on the large image of the character in the top-left hand corner of the window.

You can choose characters in the following ways:

By sight

This tab displays a grid with all the characters in the font. To choose a character, simply click on it.

By name

This tab displays a list with the Unicode names of all the characters in the font. To choose a character, click on its name. If you enter some text for “Character” and click “Search”, only characters matching that text will be shown. Click “Show all” to go back to showing all characters.

By code

If you know the code for a character (perhaps because you are used to typing in an Alt code for it, or because someone has given you the Unicode code point of the character) you can select the character here by typing in the code.

Accents

Here you can select a character by selecting a base letter (for example “e”) and choosing which accents to combine it with—for example, “acute” and “circumflex”. Letters can also be joined together here (for example O plus E to make Œ). Not all combinations of accents and letters are possible (the accents that are not possible will turn grey so you cannot select them); and of the ones that are possible not all are present in every font. (See ‘Character’ above for how to find out which fonts contain a character.)

By turning off Only show characters present in font you can cause the “by sight” and “by name” characters to display characters that don’t exist in the current font. This can be useful if you do not know which font contains the character you want.

A message will be displayed if you select a character that is not present in the current font. (Windows can sometimes still display the character by substituting a character from another font, but not always). If this happens you can double-click on the large characer in the top-left hand corner to display the fonts that are installed on your system that contain this character (if any). The standard Windows fonts Tahoma, Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial contain a very good selection of characters, covering most languages in common use.