Most Useful Discovery for Online Woodworkers EVER EVER EVER

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option 2, it's the one in between control and command at the bottom left by the space bar.

On my Macs, I have to use Option-Shift-2 for the € symbol. Using Option-2 gives me the ™ symbol. Option-3 gives me the £ symbol, which comes in handy sometimes.

Another feature of the Mac OS is holding any of the keys that have an international option will bring up a window showing the options. Pressing the number corresponding to the character inserts the character where the cursor is. To insert the Umlaut "o", I press "o" for an extra second and then press 2. Normally, I use the Option-U command for any Umlaut characters because it's almost muscle memory now.


Screen Shot 2022-08-17 at 09.20.15.png
 
On my iPhone I have to change the language to French to obtain º from dwelling on the ‘O’, else in English that option just isn’t there!?
 
On my iPhone I have to change the language to French to obtain º from dwelling on the ‘O’, else in English that option just isn’t there!?
It works great on my iPad but on my older iPhone holding the 0 gives me a whole range of O based versions,,,Im afraid I couldn't tell you what exactly because my education didn't run to more than the basics,,,fascinating stuff though.
Steve
 
For an iMac you can bring up a Character Viewer that has emojis, math symbols, currency symbols, etc, which can be dragged and dropped into whatever you are writing. ➤➲➵Ωℳ℥₢﷼€£⨌⨊⅋😉

Open System Preferences
Select the Keyboard
Tick the Show keyboard and emoji viewers in the menu bar
An icon shows up in the top left of the screen

When you need a symbol click it and the Show Emoji & Symbols.
Pick the things you need and then drag and drop the symbol
Close the box when you're done.

I suspect there are similar goodies in MacBooks and iPads.

Pete
 
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Inspector, u lot......
how do u know all this [email protected].....

I could never find out to add a photo to an email for years....
my mate stayed with us for a bit and I got his 5 year old daughter to show me how....
hahaha......I'm just dumb I guess.....I was about 60 then.....
mind I wasn't born with a phone in me hand....
our tech as a kid was two tin cans and a length of string....
 
I picked up a few bits and pieces since getting the iMac almost a dozen years ago. Anything I don't know I just pose the question on how to do something in a search and an answer will pop up. My childhood tech was a knife, an axe and a bunch of yelling.

Pete
 
@Adam W. The sum of my Dansk
fem Øl tak
hvor kommer du fra
hvad heder du
hvor gammel er du
du er smuk

Learned in my late teens when stationed at Karup
all a young lad need know ;)
 
em Øl tak
hvor kommer du fra
hvad heder du
hvor gammel er du
du er smuk
Did you have much luck?
I struggled to get this into google translate. Copy and paste gave a page of code. And the spelling is counter intuitive for me. And why 5 beers?
 
In my job, I use a lot of symbols when typing and I got fed up with the alt codes as they seem such a backwards way of doing it. To make my life easier I wrote a little application (written in python, but can be compiled to a windows executable so it doesn't require python) that makes symbol entry much easier (in my opinion). With it, you hit Win+K (or whatever key combination you've configured) and a very simple window pops up:

View attachment 141847

In that window, you type two characters. When you type the second character, the window disappears and a symbol gets pasted into whichever application you were using before pressing the shortcut. So, for example, I hit Win+K then Co and the result is ©.

The symbol obviously depends on which two characters you type, but I think they're a lot more intuitive than the alt codes (I didn't invent them: they came from a text editor called Vim that has native support for these codes). Examples:

DG makes °
2S makes ²
2s makes ₂
12 makes ½
-: makes ÷
+- makes ±
OK makes ✓
>= makes ≥
=> makes ⇒
TM makes ™
/- makes †
m* makes μ
l* makes λ
p* makes π
W* makes Ω (the letter, * pattern works for all the Greek alphabet letters)
c, makes ç
e' makes é
e> makes ê
e: makes ë
O/ makes Ø
?= makes ≅
!= makes ≠
-N makes – (en-dash)
... and the list goes on

The application used to be published on bitbucket before they removed support for the version control system it was written in. I keep meaning to release it somewhere else (on my website if nothing else), but have never got round to it. I use it many, many times a day and would hate to have to go back to using ALT codes (especially since I sometimes use a laptop without a numeric keyboard and the ALT codes don't work on the top row number keys). However, I guess I'm probably relatively unusual in the number of times a day I type μ, ° and ±, so I'm not sure how widely appealing my little application would actually be!

The lookup table I have printed by my desk (not that I have to refer to it very often as I find most of the codes easy to remember):

View attachment 141849
That's excellent Dr Al. If you do decide to publish the Windows exe I'd love a copy. I don't need these symbols/special characters/why much but when I do it is always a pain to find the right symbol in the right font.

Thanks
Steve
 
Did you have much luck?
I struggled to get this into google translate. Copy and paste gave a page of code. And the spelling is counter intuitive for me. And why 5 beers?
Squadies always buy in rounds and yes I was very lucky as a young lad, probably because I had hair then :p
 
There's also Windows Accessories - Character Map which is easy to use on the odd occasion.
 
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