I’ve had to type a few non-English characters lately, and this blog talks about how to do this.
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.
The Need for Non-English Characters
Recently I wrote a blog on using Chinese characters. While you can copy/paste from Google, perhaps you want to actually type something regularly. For example, I have been learning French, and I sometimes need to
Another one I’ve used fairly often is the British pound symbol.
Typing Unicode characters
There are Unicode characters for these symbols. While some keyboards may include these, the US ones do not. I can switch keyboards, and I have a Japanese keyboard, but
A few commons ones for me are:
- é (French e with acute (forward) accent) – 0233
- è (French e with the grave accent) – 0232
- ô (French o with the circumflex) – 0244
- ç (French c with the cedilla,hanging thing) – 0231
- £ (British pound symbol) – 0163
- はい (Japanese yes, hai) – a little harder
To type these, I press the ALT key and hold it. Then I enter the number. So, holding ALT and entering 0163 gives me this: £
The Japanese is a little harder. There I needed to enable the Microsoft IME keyboard that lets me type the phonetics for Japanese characters. There are other ways to do this, but that’s what I did.
Learning to work with other languages and characters has been interesting to me, and it’s nice to be able to type São Paulo instead of Sao Paulo. Especially when I communicate with people whose names contain non English letters.