Writing Characters

The practical difficulties of producing characters on normal computer keyboards are among the most serious obstacles to more widespread use of rich character repertoires. Most modern computers have rather good Unicode support, but people don't make use of it, because they simply don't know how to type special characters .

This chapter presents some common methods of entering characters. It is largely a collection of recipes, useful to people who work daily with texts containing "difficult" characters. Appendix A gives a quick reference for commonly needed characters.

The topic is also relevant to IT specialists who need to understand the possible input methods when designing applications and systems. The same applies to giving instructions on data entry, or simply asking someone to send you in writing (on paper or in digital form) something that contains characters that are "special" to him. It is not sufficient to know some way of typing characters, since users may not have the same methods at their disposal, or they might find it too awkward.