How to Type Symbols Using the ALT Key

How to Type Symbols Using the ALT Key(1)

Western English language based computer systems, including much of the Internet, use a particular character set known as US-ASCII or simply ASCII, which may or may not the contain characters you need. Recently, this 'default" character set has been supplanted by the ISO 1 character set that contains more foreign phrase glyphs (individual characters). For use on a computer, character sets are encoded and set in a table where a positive number is assigned to each character, or glyph.
Typically, a character set includes far more characters than you will use in the course of normal writing. You can access these "hidden" characters by using a modifier key, most commonly the alt key. Within a given character set standard, there can be many fonts and font families, and while all fonts are supposed to have all the characters from a given set, many do not, or are inaccurate, thus your results may vary depending on the font you are using.

Steps
1.Open the Character Map utility:
Click on the Windows Start menu.
Select "Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", then "Character Map".
2.Choose a font.

3.Double-click the character(s) you want. It is important to select the exact font you're using in your document before selecting the symbol you wish to copy. Not all font-faces contain all possible combinations of available symbols.

4.Click on Copy.

5.Return to your document.

6.Click on Paste. You may need to change the font size of the character after you've pasted it into your document.

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