Maggie's Farm

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This is quick and easy.

Go to Start Menu, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, 'Character Map': 

Flip the drop-down menu at the top to 'Arial'.

Find your custom character.  If you want to copy it to memory and use Ctrl-V to punch it in later on, double-click on it and you should see it appear in the box, ready for pasting.

To do the keyboard routine, note the "Alt" numbers in the lower-right.  In this case, you'd hold down either Alt key, punch in 0233 in the numeric keypad over to the right, then release the Alt key.  The é character will pop right up on the screen.  Note that it won't work with the regular number keys, just the ones on the numeric keypad.

The only hitch is that they're composed of four numbers, so they're a little hard to keep memorized over time if you don't use them very often.  The only two I know by heart are the é con accénto and Alt-0151 for the — horizontal — bar.  You can always scribble them down on a post-it and stick it somewhere handy.

If you were typing text in a word processing program or a graphics program like Photoshop and wanted to include a font from a different fontset, like 'Symbol', you'd first open Character Map and set the drop-down menu to 'Symbol', then find your custom font and either copy it to memory or remember the four ALT numbers, then swing around to the program, set the fonts to 'Symbol', punch it in, then switch back to your normal fonts.