Hi Bernie,
You're stepping into a quagmire here. :-)
Computers use "code pages" to translate between numbers (which is really all
they use internally) and the characters -- technically, the "glyphs" or
pictures of characters -- that appear on the screen.
The numbers you're used to are defined by code page 437, the IBM PC or
MS-DOS code page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437). While this is
older than Windows and isn't used much by current software, I doubt that any
manufacturer intends to completely remove support for it.
The numbers with the 0 prefix are from the Windows 1252 code page
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252), which is pretty much standard
for Western languages. This code page has a different order for the letters
outside the basic alphabet, and the drawing characters are replaced with
more accented letters.
There are indeed other ways
(
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/I...pecChars.htm): In recent versions
of Word you can type the Unicode number directly into the text and then
press Alt+X; some symbols have default shortcuts; and there's a Symbols
dialog to let you click a picture of the one you want.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ:
http://word.mvps.org
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Bernie Marquardt wrote:
Hi there. I am always amazed at the ways of making accents in text. I
type in several languages and over the years I got used to using for
instance alt+130 (on the numeric keyboard) to render an é, or alt+164
to render a ñ. Now if I invoke the function in Microsoft Word to
insert a symbol, it has other numbers to do the same thing, like
alt+0233 for the é and alt+0241 for the ñ. (Notice the added 0). Both
systems work. And I a believe in Word 2007, there are even additional
methods to do this. Why isn't there a standard way? Will the old
method (the one I am used to) be phased out?