I’ve had to type a few non-English characters lately, and this blog talks about how to do this.
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.
The Need for Non-English Characters
Recently I wrote a blog on using Chinese characters. While you can copy/paste from Google, perhaps you want to actually type something regularly. For example, I have been learning French, and I sometimes need to
Another one I’ve used fairly often is the British pound symbol.
Typing Unicode characters
There are Unicode characters for these symbols. While some keyboards may include these, the US ones do not. I can switch keyboards, and I have a Japanese keyboard, but
A few commons ones for me are:
- é (French e with acute (forward) accent) – 0233
- è (French e with the grave accent) – 0232
- ô (French o with the circumflex) – 0244
- ç (French c with the cedilla,hanging thing) – 0231
- £ (British pound symbol) – 0163
- はい (Japanese yes, hai) – a little harder
To type these, I press the ALT key and hold it. Then I enter the number. So, holding ALT and entering 0163 gives me this: £
The Japanese is a little harder. There I needed to enable the Microsoft IME keyboard that lets me type the phonetics for Japanese characters. There are other ways to do this, but that’s what I did.
Learning to work with other languages and characters has been interesting to me, and it’s nice to be able to type São Paulo instead of Sao Paulo. Especially when I communicate with people whose names contain non English letters.
Voice of the DBA 
Steve – So is it possible using the on-screen keyboard to have that keyboard using say the Japanese character set without changing what language is being used for the Windows UI and without changing how your physical keyboard works?
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What I do is hit Windows+Space and it switches. Be default, I have the English characters, same ones. Then there is a little “A” in the task bar. I can click that and switch from English to the IME（Japanese for me）
I can type English with the Japanese keyboard, but sometimes it inserts the character when it’s read a phonetic. It’s not too cumbersome, and I only turn it on when I want to try something.
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You can also use Windows Key + . (period) to open up the Unicode menu, which has accented characters under Ω, then é (if I recall correctly). All kinds of emoji and other characters are in there, and you can browse for them instead of memorizing alt codes (although I still use Alt + 26 for →).
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That’s interesting. Good for finding a character, but looks really annoying if I had to get a bunch of things typed.
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I’ve found the Character Map to be quite useful!
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For taking notes in One Note for my PA prereqs I created a page to remember the shortcuts because I use some so much:
Alt – 0176 – degree °
Alt – 224 – alpha α
Alt – 225 – beta ß
Alt – 916 – delta Δ
Alt – 230 – micro µ
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See also https://www.alt-codes.net/ for more alt codes, if needed.
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I find myself switching between using ENG UK and ENG UKX for my keyboard layout (and switching is easy enough with Win/Super+Space), as it makes accessing some characters easier. For example in UKX pressing [Alt Gr]+6 (releasing) and then u produces û. Back tick (`) followed by o produces ò. I do find I swap back to UK afterwards though, as I frequently use characters like backticks when I don’t want an accented character and pushing my brain to use `, Esc when in UKX to get the character is a little annoying.
Annoyingly the UKX layout differs slightly between different operating systems. For example an eszett (ß) when I’m using Linux is [Alt Gr]+S, but on Windows I’ve no idea how to get to it other than with a different tool.
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