Notes & Asides - alternative letters, accents and characters in modern computer keyboards - Brief Article - Letter to the Editor

National Review, Sept 2, 2002 by William F. Buckley Jr.

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Your correspondent Horst R. Brakel (N&A, July 1) lalaments that computer keyboards neglect the umlaut. Please inform him that help is at hand!

Using MS Word with the Arial, CG Times, or Times New Roman font, one can produce the umlaut as follows: Hold down the Alt key and type 0228 to produce a, 0235 to produce e, and 0252 to produce u.

Be sure to have the numbers lock activated, and use the number keypad to type in the numerical sequence.

Yours for international accommodation,

James G. Pastorius Jr.

Richmond, Va.

--Dear Mr. Buckley: In a recent N&A, Mr. Horst Brakel bemoaned the ababsence of umlauted letters on English-language keyboards. Nowadays most word-processing software offers a "special symbol" feature which, when accessed, displays a rich assortment of characters, including those Mr. Brakel wants.

Better, ever since the advent of the machine we call the PC, there has been a built-in access feature for the "upper ASCII" characters. The ones that are for foreign languages are ASCII 128 through 168. To enter one, hold down the Alt key and type the number on the keypad.

A table of codes follows.

Respectfully yours,

Loring Emery

Albuquerque, N.M.

--Dear Mr. Buckley: To reopen the dieresis discussion, Mr. Brakel isis wrong to accuse computers of limiting one's ability to produce non- standard characters. Computers are veritable-or virtual-type foundries.

Anyone dissatisfied with QWERTY yet disinclined either to resort to a tedious character-insertion procedure or to learn finger-breaking key combinations should get to know what's available from the numeric pad on the right of the keyboard.

For instance, holding down the Alt key while typing 0246 (sequentially) will distinguish a cop from a coop-just be sure "Num Lock" is on! That em dash was produced with Alt 0151. Alt 0131 is usefull when doing 18th-century parodies. Your spell-checker may carp, but your Spanish friends will appreciate [inverted question mark]Como esta usted? And when you put that o in Soren, well, somewhere the philosopher will be smiling.

I'm told these number combinations are ANSI codes, but the results I get from my setup (WordPerfect 6.1 running under Windows 95) don't correspond to the ANSI tables found in Windows manuals, so don't take the codes listed above as gospel.

However, it's easy enough to make your own table. Start with Alt 33; for some reason, Windows applications don't produce anything from 0 to 32. For some other reason, at least for me, typing 100-255 produces different results than 0100-0255. Once you've got all the characters, print out an A-list of gems like:

By the way, if you could enlighten me about s, I would be in your debt. It's beautiful and I'm dying to use it but I don't even know its name.

John R. Stephenson Jr.

Verona, N.J.

--Gentlemen, thank you all. I feel as if I had been given a fresh coat ofof arms! And the request is made to answer the question of Mr. Stephenson: What is it you call the thing he came up with?

Cordially,

-WFB