Windows 7 – How to Enter a Hyphen (Not a Minus Symbol)

fontskeyboard shortcutsunicodewindows 7

Looked up the codes here http://unicodelookup.com/#hyphen/1 and I'm told that the unicode character is (in decimal) is 8208. So when I enter ALT+8208 on the numpad in Wordpad, I get this symbol a box with a question mark.

But then when I copy and paste that glyph over to SO here, it pastes as the hyphen. What I really want is the keyboard combo to insert a hyphen wherever I am typing.

Interestingly, if I type ALT+8208 here I get ►. This is extremely frustrating.

Best Answer

Those are probably two completely unrelated issues.

  1. It sounds like the problem in Word is your font. Most (all?) fonts do not support all Unicode characters.

    The fact that copying and pasting results in the right character shows that Word "understood" the key combination, but cannot display the character as it should. Try using another font.

  2. The problem in the browser is bad Unicode support.

    Try setting the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method\EnableHexNumpad to 1 and using the hexadecimal keyboard combination instead, i.e., Alt + (+, 2, 0, 1, 0). Note that you have to press + on the numpad as well.

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