[Ansteorra] Special Characters for Germanic Languages

Christie Ward val_org at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 12 09:10:28 PDT 2001


Madelina said:
>I don't know the ones for Old English or Norse such as the letter "thorn",
>the "o" with a slash through it, & etc.

In any Windows-based machine it's pretty straightforward, and you can get
there in a number of ways.

You can open a little program called CharMap, located somewhere under your
Windows directory (mine is at C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\charmap.exe) and access a
regular font,
such as Arial or Times New Roman etc (i.e., *not* a symbol font).  You can
find all of the special characters here, and you can select one or more then
cut it to the clipboard for use elsewhere.

Even easier would be to use the ALT+keypad combinations.  To type any
special character, with the "NUM LOCK" turned on you can simply hold down
the ALT key, then using the keypad type a four-digit numeral.

The characters I use most are:

0193 Á     0225 á
0196 Ä     0228 ä
0197 Å     0229 å
0198 Æ     0230 æ
0201 É     0235 ë
0203 Ë     0235 ë
0205 Í     0237 í
0211 Ó     0243 ó
0214 Ö     0246 ö
0216 Ø     0248 ø
0218 Ú     0250 ú
0220 Ü     0252 ü
0221 Ý     0253 ý
0208 Ð     0240 ð
0222 Þ     0254 þ
0223 ß

Now, having said all of that, here is a caveat.  Older email programs cannot
handle high-order ASCII characters -- so if you use any of these specialized
characters in an email then send it to an unfortunate who is stuck using an
older email reader, then they'll see a hexadecimal number that comes across
looking like garbage on their screen.  For example, instead of:

     Aðalráðr Böðólfsson

the person with a old mail reader might see:

     A=F0alr=E1=F0r B=F6=F0=F3lfsson

::GUNNORA::

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com




More information about the Ansteorra mailing list