Unicode Explained

CHAPTER 2

Writing Characters

The practical difficulties of producing characters on normal computer keyboards are

among the most serious obstacles to more widespread use of rich character repertoires.

Most modern computers have rather good Unicode support, but people don’t make

use of it, because they simply don’t know how to type special characters.

This chapter presents some common methods of entering characters. It is largely a

collection of recipes, useful to people who work daily with texts containing “difficult”

characters. Appendix A gives a quick reference for commonly needed characters.

The topic is also relevant to IT specialists who need to understand the possible input

methods when designing applications and systems. The same applies to giving instruc-

tions on data entry, or simply asking someone to send you in writing (on paper or in

digital form) something that contains characters that are “special” to him. It is not

sufficient to know some way of typing characters, since users may not have the same

methods at their disposal, or they might find it too awkward.

Method Varieties

There is no single answer to a question like “How do I write the character…?” The

methods vary by program and equipment. In any given situation, there are usually

several ways to write a character.

When you give individual instructions to someone, or you are solving your own prob-

lem with typing characters, ...