Standard game - Monday 16th.

[Les303]

Is it just me or do others find that one of the biggest frustrations with chi is missing that rosette that you know you should have got.

I played crouped & croupe but not croup.
I also played pure , pured & puree but not purer.
But most embarrassingly , I played purred but not purr & I was even totally sober at the time. ( well , maybe not totally).

[yelnats]

And I only missed 'CRUD'. I guess I'm too refined, or Victorian, as in the era, not the state.

[2dognight]

I missed purer but I put it down to the heat 43C

How do find  a degree sign on a computer?

Carol

[Les303]

That's a good question Carol , come on Stanley, after all you are a self confessed computer geek & while your at it could you please explain while , when putting something in inverted commas " such as this " , the commas are straight up & down & not on a 45. ( gee a degree symbol would have been handy there . )

[Calilasseia]

I missed purer but I put it down to the heat 43C

How do find  a degree sign on a computer?

Carol

If you're using a Windows PC, you can generate a lot of characters as follows:

Step 1: Hold down the ALT key;

Step 2: Whilst holding down the ALT key, type a number on the keyboard's numeric keypad. NOTE: this ONLY works for keyboards with a numeric keypad, though most modern keyboards have one.

Step 3: Having typed the number, let go of the ALT key, and a character should appear.

For example, ALT-248 produces the degree sign, thus: °

ALT-0198 produces the ½ fraction.

ALT-0215 produces a multiplication sign: ×

ALT-0247 produces a division sign: ÷

In addition, if you're typing text that's going to end up on a bulletin board, and your bulletin board supports the use of what are called "HTML entities", then you can insert any Unicode character you like into your post, though I'm not sure that the LexiGame board supports this. An HTML entity consists of the following character sequence:

[1] The "&" symbol;

[2] Either of:

[2a] A string of digits for the Unicode number associated with the character you want, preceded by a "#";

or:

[2b] A character name from the official W3C list of names (such as "eacute" to produce the small letter "e" with an acute accent, é);

[3] The ";" character (semicolon).

Sample HTML entities look like this:

Code: [Select]

π

π


Both of the above entities in the boxed example produce the Greek letter pi.

You'll know if the LexiGame board supports these, if this:

π

appears as the letter pi in my post. If not, and it appears as in the boxed example, then the board doesn't support HTML entities. Though it would be relatively easy to enable this, and I could provide Alan with some quick JavaScript to facilitate this if he wants.

[Alan W]

Or, find a website that has the symbol you want (e.g. Weatherzone for the degree sign) and use copy and paste: °

[2dognight]

Oh Alan you have made my day

Thank you Calilasseia for your info but have to be honest I didn't understand most of it.
My computer is past its use buy date and does not have all the gadgetry

Come to think of it I am nearly past my use by date

Thank you both
Carol

[yelnats]

I've been scanning a 'Learn Spanish' book, and making it into a web page with the Google translate English in the right hand column for my U3A Spanish class.

I would have used é (é) etc. normally, but the scanner OCR software knows Spanish and all the accented letters and  I can just copy and paste into HTML and it works wonderfully.

A list of Alt codes is attached.

[Calilasseia]

Or, find a website that has the symbol you want (e.g. Weatherzone for the degree sign) and use copy and paste: °

Problem with that being knowing which websites have the symbols you want.

Now of course, the Unicode website has full documentation on just about every character set you could imagine, but the charts containing the characters aren't that easy to use, because they're maintained as Adobe PDF files. Though if you're determined, you can even extract some Egyptian hieroglyphs from those charts.

Trouble is, for some of the more exotic character sets, you need a font containing the glyphs residing on your own computer, before you see anything other than a black diamond with a question mark in it. So we won't be sharing Egyptian hieroglyphs as Unicode characters here any time soon, as you need to install special fonts to see them.

On the other hand, if you copy and paste from the Latin Extended-A set, this is supported in most fonts, so you can obtain strange characters like this one:

ę

which is apparently the Polish/Lithuanian small letter "e" with ogonek descender.

Most of the frequently desired non-standard characters, such as letters with acute and grave accents for French, are in this file, the Latin-1 Supplement, which includes the copyright symbol, Spanish inverted exclamation mark & the masculine/feminine ordinals, and the German scharfes-ess.

Latin Extended-A includes the characters used in Slavic languages, Latin Extended-B includes characters used for Serbian, Croat and Latin transliteration of various obscure African languages (does anyone here speak Zulu?), and you can have all sorts of fun exploring the exotic characters included in Latin Extended-C, D & E (Latin Extended-E covers Mediaeval German, amongst other things).

Those with a whimsical bent can explore the ornamental dingbats, and if you want the trade mark symbol, you need the letter-like symbols set.

[2dognight]

Calilasseia if anyone is a Dingbat it is me

Good old Aussie expression that

Carol

[Les303]

I'm with you Carol , they lost me after step 1 , how on earth do you guys remember all this stuff , I reckon that you just about need a degree in computer science to follow it so I think that I will just continue with that very onerous & time consuming task of having to type in 6 letters to express a degree.

[Leedscot]

Unicode is really useful, as are alternative (software) keyboards - I use a custom one for phonetic symbols - but there are sometimes easier alternatives.

Try º for degrees [alt-0] (that's a zero). Gives you 45º etc.

Or alt-e, e for é
alt-u, u for ü
alt-`, a for à, etc.
That last one is the key between z and the (left) shift key.
Also [alt-c] for ç.

Try also holding down the alt key and then going through the other keys on the keyboard - you might be surprised at what diacritics you can create.

Finally, try alt-[, alt-], alt-shift-[ and alt-shift-] if you're picky about curly quotes and apostrophes.

[Leedscot]

And try alt-r for ®
alt-g for ©
alt-t for †
alt-/ for ÷
alt-8 for a bullet •

And another alternative for the degree sign - alt-shift-8 gives °

Be careful with some of the ordinary letter keys, though, as they can perform functions that you might not want to happen at that particular moment!

[Les303]

Thank you very much Leedscot , Cal & Yelnats for your tips but to be honest , by the time that I have typed this post , I will have forgotten all of them.

[birdy]

Thank you very much Leedscot , Cal & Yelnats for your tips but to be honest , by the time that I have typed this post , I will have forgotten all of them.

I know what you mean, Les303 - I cannot remember many of these either.  I've written out a bunch of the "alt"s on a small pad of paper, which is perched about 2 feet away from my monitor and keyboard - close enough for me to see and grab the pad when one of those things comes up.  By the way, on that list, "degree" is alt+0176, which obviously didn't work here.