How to type characters using the alt button. Characters on the keyboard: we want to print everything

Today everyone can type the text. Even the most resistant opponents of new technologies know how to type characters on the keyboard ( but do not do it out of principle). After all, all that is required is to find the key with the desired letter or punctuation mark and press it with your finger:

But sometimes there are situations when the desired character is simply not on the keyboard. For example, a person writes a text about the temperature at the South Pole, and the symbol for degrees is absent. In this case, not only a beginner, but also a sufficiently experienced user ( or one who considers himself to them).

But a way out of this situation certainly exists. When the characters on the keyboard do not meet the requirements, you must use other input methods. Some of them will be discussed in this article.

Why is not everything on the keyboard?

If you lower your gaze just below the monitor screen, you can see different characters on the keyboard, which, nevertheless, look very familiar. They are used, oddly enough, in order to print, and humankind has been keen on this for a long time.

Back in 1868 a typewriter was introduced to the world ( although tried to do it a century earlier), the letters on it were arranged in alphabetical order, and it took people 22 years to eliminate this inconvenience. In turn, in 1890, the QWERTY layout appeared, which migrated to modern keyboards.

Thus, the composition and location of the main symbols were developed over the years, and over time humanity did not invent something radically new in this regard, but only improved the old one.

Why does the keyboard remain the same, and there will be no one who wants to make money on the novelty? It should be understood that large companies that produce equipment must be oriented to a wide audience, therefore, the characters and characters on the keyboard are designed for the most common needs. To understand the manufacturers, it is necessary to identify the categories of people who use computers.

• Regular users. They need to go online, check their emails and in some cases write small texts ( messages, announcements):

For these people do not require additional characters on the keyboard, and even those who are there, a bit too much.

Keyboard symbols include the basic reserved constructs of many programming languages ​​( &, |, #, (), etc.  ). Such popular and most widely used languages ​​as C, C ++, Lisp, Java have a well-established syntax, which was originally partially adjusted to the characters on the keyboard. Therefore, if now the standard layout changes significantly, it will lead to significant inconvenience for programmers, and no one needs this.

• Office workers. These comrades in most cases operate with numbers, so their needs are closely intersected with the programmer ones:

Mathematical operations, percentage and dollar sign are the right companions of each report.

Needless to say that today everyone uses computers everywhere. In many cases, people need to enter characters that are not on the keyboard. It may be some kind of scientific designation or just a more appropriate means of display in a particular situation.

In order to accommodate all the known characters would need thousands of keyboards, but the keys have a remarkable feature: they can be pressed on several pieces at once. However, more on that later.

Special characters

We are used to the fact that a character is something visual, but when formatting text it is often necessary to make indents and line breaks that are ignored by the browser when displayed. In this case, apply special symbols. On the keyboard they are not, but in the html-code, you can, for example, register & nbsp, which will mean an unbreakable space.

Imagine another situation: you are writing an article about Internet technologies and want to give examples of html language tags. But that's bad luck: you know how to put characters on the keyboard ( not small after all), however, the browser treats tags as tags and displays nothing. In this case, special characters come to the rescue.

Sometimes authors of articles get an intricate task: how to write characters on the keyboard if they are not on it. Weak surrender and apply tricks, calling the words that could not print. The initiates turn to special characters and find what they need:

For example, 7 is a Jewish star; the symbol on the keyboard is missing, but when writing religious texts is very useful.

Character codes

We have already reviewed the special character codes of the html language, however there are other ways to show what is not shown on the keyboard keys.

First of all, we should mention the encoding standards: ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, which allow not only to enter characters using the keyboard, but also to set them programmatically, when the screen displays not a number 300, but a beautiful heart ( if the encoding is ASCII).

There is a way to expand the existing characters on the keyboard - ALT-code. To enter characters in this way, you absolutely do not need to go to a special editor:

In order to know how to make characters on the keyboard ( even those that are not there and about which you do not know), it is enough to have a sign in front of your eyes and, holding alt key, enter a sequence of numbers.

How to enter what is not on the keyboard?

For those who do not know how to make characters on the keyboard that are not displayed on the keys, putting together everything mentioned above can be distinguished in several ways.

• Take advantage of opportunities text editor. Programs like Microsoft Word   and its analogues offer a lot of possibilities, besides how to write characters on the keyboard ( drawing up formulas, displaying physical units, choosing different styles of punctuation marks). Therefore, you can safely type texts on any subject;
• Special characters html. Not knowing how to put the characters on the keyboard during the publication of articles on the World Wide Web, you can use the table of special characters. It will help to display almost any known designation, however, you should choose common fonts ( Arial, Times

  Materials on the topic

Hello precious friend.

[GOAL] Today we will review characters that are not on the keyboard  (graphic characters). ❦

At one time, I had a chance to search more than a dozen in searching for these characters, but what can I say, sooo many sites.

I think you will agree with me that the use of such elements in the text makes it more attractive and interesting ❀ More often, of course, these symbols are used in social networks, and now also in e-mail newsletters, to distinguish their appeal from the total mass ✔

This symbolism is also called Unicode. What is it? To make it clearer, let's turn to

Unicode  (most often) or Unikod(eng. Unicode) - A character encoding standard that allows you to represent the signs of almost all written languages.

The standard was proposed in 1991 by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization. Unicode Consortium, Unicode Inc.) The application of this standard allows you to encode a very large number of characters from different scripts: Chinese characters, mathematical symbols, letters of the Greek alphabet, Latin and Cyrillic characters can coexist in Unicode documents, and switching of code pages becomes unnecessary.

The standard consists of two main sections: the universal character set (eng. UCS, universal character set) and family of encodings (eng. UTF, Unicode transformation format). The universal character set defines a one-to-one correspondence between characters and codes — elements of the code space that represent non-negative integers. The encoding family defines the machine representation of a sequence of UCS codes.

Unicode codes are divided into several areas. The area with codes from U + 0000 to U + 007F contains ASCII characters with corresponding codes. Next are the areas of characters of various scripts, punctuation marks and technical symbols. Part of the code is reserved for future use. Under Cyrillic characters, character areas with codes from U + 0400 to U + 052F, from U + 2DE0 to U + 2DFF, from U + A640 to U + A69F are highlighted (see Cyrillic in Unicode).

Now that the picture has become clearer and we know how graphic symbols work and are displayed, I want to bring to your attention a selection of the most common and sought-after symbols that are not on the keyboard, which means that using one keystroke will not work.

Any of the presented symbols can be added as on the sites in the social. network, and working in Word.

Note!  In some types of browsers, characters may not be displayed, and instead they will not display clear characters or a blank square. This is due to different technologies, browsers ( Mozilla firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE), as well as the version of Windows.

Yes, I almost forgot ... In order to get the desired character, just copy it by selecting it with the mouse and paste it where you need it.