ANSI Characters

To insert any character from 032 to 0255 in a document you hold down the ALT key and type the digits including the leading zero on the numeric keypad (not the top row numbers). Release the ALT key and the character appears. This is true of MS OSs at least. On the Mac, the process and the character set is different.

I have used this method of entering non-keyboard characters since I discovered it long ago. On the wall next to me I have two full ANSI charts, one for Arial (which is the same as almost all other fonts) and the Wingding font. The characters you use regularly become part of your keyboarding repertoire and are largely application independent. The keyboard shortcuts are different in PageMaker than Word for instance. Much easier to have one sequence that's "universal".

The two charts I use are available for download in MS Word format here. Some caveats: the box characters you see at 0128, 0129 and elsewhere often do not print. Better to use a Wingding box when you need one. 0176 is the symbol for temperature and 0186 is the elevated oh as in N^o. This set is different to the IBM Extended that DOS used and that's why shifting documents between the two OSs was such a PITA. IBM Extended wasn't much use for typography being more oriented toward displaying graphics on a character mode interface.

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