Windows – How to Type En-Dash and Em-Dash in Windows 7/8

In Word, Alt,+,2212 is taken As Alt+2212, i.e. it produced the character with decimal code 2212 (8A4 hexadecimal). To enter a character conventiently in Word on the basis of its hexadecimal code, type that code normally and the Alt+X. If the code would be immediately preceded by a hexadecimal digit or the letter x, you need to prefix it with u+. Thus e.g. 1u+2212 Alt+X produces 1−.

For some reason, Word has its own handling for input like Alt,+,... Therefore, there is uniform method for entering the minus sign. You can create one by installing a keyboard driver that has a key or key combination assigned for the purpose, such as my Math Keyboard layout for QWERTY keyboards on Windows. (It makes the hyphen “-” is US keyboard produce the minus sign. It is intended to be used so that you switch between it and some normal keyboard layout, using this one for math expressions only. You can of course take any normal layout and just modify it so that e.g. right Alt (AltGr) changes “-” to “−”.)

The input method you seem to be using is the “universal” method on the Fileformat.info page How to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows: press down Alt, enter + using the num keypad key, type the Unicode number in hexadecimal digits, release the Alt. Though very useful, the method isn’t really universal. First, it requires a Windows registry setting, which is usually off by default; but you have apparently this setting OK. Second, typing a character with Alt pressed down may get handled by the software you are using. Apparently in your version of Firefox, AltF gets handled by the browser. But even if you could fix this, it would not help you to enter U+1F3BB. The reason is the third essential limitation of the “universal” method: it works only up to U+FFFF, i.e. for characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Many new icon-like characters have been allocated outside the BMP.

Regarding the clash with shortcut assignments, it seems that using the Shift key together with the Alt key solves the problem. That is, press both Shift and Alt down when starting and keep them both pressed down until you have typed the hex digits. Tested in Firefox 84 in Win 10. Also works in Chrome

The BMP restriction is exemplified by the observation in comments: trying to enter U+10400 using the method results in Ѐ, which is Cyrillic letter Е with grave, U+0400. So when you typed 10400 in trying to use the method, the leading 1 was ignored. (In other words, the hex number entered was taken modulo 10000 hex.)

However, as phuclv’s answer tells, you can enter a non-BMP character as a surrogate pair. You would need to consult resources like Fileformat.info to find out the surrogate values (or tediously compute them).

For typing non-BMP characters, copy and paste is often the most practical way. Of course, you first need something to copy; you could use online tables of characters, or my Full Unicode Input utility, or the character picker in Microsoft Word (which extends past BMP, unlike the Windows character picker, i.e. CharMap).