Let's all sing along!
♪ Oh, say can you see,
by the dawn's early light... ♫
While I don't think any of these would fall under the heading of 'earthshakingly critical', there might be the odd occasion, like the above, where it would be fun to throw one or two into a comment or email.
For standard special fonts (is that an oxymoron?), like é con acento or the tilde in señor, they're all right there on the top panel of the Character Map program, found in Start Menu, Programs, Accessories, System Tools. First select 'Arial' at the top, double-click on the character you want, hit the 'Copy' button to copy it to memory, then hit Ctrl-V to paste it into the editor.
And you have zee perfect résumé!
Pic: Sorry, the artist screwed up. He thought I said special founts.
There are, however, a handful of oddball fonts that only reside in some offbeat font set or in only one common set in an odd place on the panel. The hitch is that we only have the default Windows fonts to work with, which basically means Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Times New Roman. If you use a special font from a different font set and the reader doesn't have that particular font on their system, it won't be displayed.
B → R B □!
Be there or be square!
The adventure continues below the fold.
Here's what I've dug up. I'll list them by font.
Arial:
Most of these are two & three panels up from the bottom.
— Musical signs ♪ ♫
— Playing cards ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦
— The squares □ ■
— Male & female signs ♂ ♀
— Arrows ← ↑ → ↓ ↔ ↕
— The common fractions are at the top, ¼ ½ ¾, below are ⅓ ⅔ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞
— It also has a check mark for your daily tasks:
√ Wake up
√ Eat breakfast
√ Read blogs
Contribute to mankind's betterment
— All Maggie's Valued Readers™ will appreciate this post
— And, for incredible authenticity, the reverse R in "Toys 'Я' Us" is in the middle about a third down.
Verdana:
— While Arial has a few superscripts, 10² 10³, Verdana adds 10⁴ 10⁵ 10⁷ 10⁸, bottom panel. It's one of those strange "quirks of science" that there's no number in the known universe that goes to the sixth power.
— hurricanes ≠ global warming
Entering The Above Via The Keyboard
This requires a numeric keypad over to the right, so laptop owners are outta luck.
You'll notice when you click on a special character in Character Map, an "Alt+xxxx" figure appears in the very lower-right.
The process is to first hold down the left Alt key, then enter the four numbers into the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key and the special character will pop onto the page.
The four I have memorized are:
— The horizontal bar — like so — is 0151
— The ™ sign is 0153
— The é con acento is 0233
— The ♥ is just 3
For the rest, I turn to Character Map.
And, showing off their versatility, here's BobZ and me in the comments in a post I made a while back, where I mentioned this upcoming post:
I ♥ Maggie's Farm.
(just making a test)
I would like to ♣ Al Gore!
And I mean that in ♠!
I've been just ♦ to tell ya that!
(might still need a bit of work)
And my response:
I ♥ the way you use Character Map!
It's like we're in an exclusive ♣!
Where we dare to call a ♠ a ♠!
Unless, of course, we're ♦etrically-opposed!
And, just to prove that Microsoft is ever willing to open its arms in friendship to our poor Apple cousins from across the tracks, some wry wit slipped this into the Verdana set:
I ♥ Ѽ
Now, that's cute.
