Windows – Some Unicode Alt-Codes Not Working

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Here is a list of all special Hungarian characters:

ALT-0193 Á   ALT-0225 á
ALT-0201 É   ALT-0233 é
ALT-0205 Í   ALT-0237 í
ALT-0211 Ó   ALT-0214 Ö   ALT-0336 Ő
ALT-0243 ó   ALT-0246 ö   ALT-0337 ő
ALT-0218 Ú   ALT-0220 Ü   ALT+0368 Ű
ALT-0250 ú   ALT-0252 ü   ALT+0369 ű

All are working with Alt+NUMPAD except the third column. I get ordinary P, Q, p and q letters instead of the letters given. What is the reason for this? What code should I input if I want to reach them?

Windows 7 Enterprise 32-bit
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acute_accent

Best Answer

RonK answered the first part of your question. The answer to the second part of your question is, as Microsoft and George Hernandez explain, to type + (on the numeric keypad) and then the hexadecimal value of the Unicode (UCS-16) character, all whilst holding the Alt key down. As George Hernandez writes, this mechanism is not enabled by default, and must be manually enabled after installing Windows.

Related Solutions

Unicode Characters – How to Type Unicode Characters Using Hexadecimal Codes

harrymc's answer is good, providing you're able/allowed to change the registry settings.

If not, you can use the Windows Calculator Accessory to convert from hexadecimal to decimal. The default mode won't do this: XP and Vista have a "Scientific mode, whereas Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 have a "Programmer" mode.

Select Hex base, and then type in your hexadecimal number. Then change to Dec base to see the equivalent value in decimal. That's the number you need to type into your numeric keypad while holding down the Alt key.

This might depend on the input language, and you might need to prefix a zero to the decimal value.

Windows – Which character encoding is used for ALT-codes

I believe these shortcuts depend on the libraries used by specific programs such as Word, Excel and Notepad. References to Alt character codes at microsoft.com are always in the context of a specific application or suite.

The character resulting from Alt+nnn ought not to depend on any IME but should respect document, application or Windows language settings that determine the default code page currently in use.

Microsoft are cavalier in their use of terms like ASCII and ANSI, documentation of Alt+nnn reflects that.

Here's a little experiment in the Command Prompt on Vista

c:\>chcp 437
Active code page: 437
c:\>rem alt+224 α
c:\>rem alt+0224 à

c:\>chcp 869
Active code page: 869
c:\>rem alt+224 ζ
c:\>rem alt+0224 à
c:\>rem alt 0137 ‰

After adding a Greek keyboard layout in Control panel, and choosing Greek from the language bar, an experiment in WordPad, showed that ALt+0224 then produces ΰ from Code Page 1253 (modern Greek) and Alt+224 produces Σ (though I haven't discovered which DOS/OEM code page that implies)

From which I deduce that

Alt+nnn is always the current DOS (also called OEM) code page
Alt+0nnn is always the current Windows code page
the above differ
the language bar can be used to change these.

At least for the programs I tried.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Unicode Characters – How to Type Unicode Characters Using Hexadecimal Codes

Windows – Which character encoding is used for ALT-codes

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