Unicode Explained

editor (regedit). If you are not familiar with registry settings, try to find someone who

knows them and can fix your settings. In HKEY_Current_User → Control Panel →

Input Method, set EnableHexNumpad to 1 (one). If the variable does not exist, add it

there and set its type to REG_SZ. Now you must reboot the system. This inconvenience

is probably partly intentional: the method is still experimental and lacks support.

Using the Alt key together with normal keys (outside the numeric keypad) often con-

flicts with keyboard shortcuts in programs, such as Alt-F for opening a File menu. This

may cause limitations for characters with letters in their hexadecimal code number.

Ctrl-Q and Other Methods in Emacs

In the Emacs editor, which is popular especially on Unix-type systems, you can produce

any ISO Latin 1 character by typing first Ctrl-Q, and then the character’s code as a

three-digit octal (base 8) number. To produce Ä, you would type Ctrl-Q followed by

the three digits 304 (and expect the Ä character to appear on screen). This method is

often referred to as C‑Q-nnn.

There are additional ways of entering many ISO Latin 1 characters in Emacs. You can

for example use the M-x iso-accents-mode command (where M-x means meta-X, which

can typically be produced by pressing first the Esc key, and then the X key). It sets

Emacs to a mode of operation where several ASCII characters are converted to diacritic ...