Acronym/ASCII

[grweyers]

I need help with my keyboard or software required to use the ASCII system. I am wanting to write to some of my friends in Rio and would like to type these email's in Portuguese. For example, I tried typing the number 136 depressing the ALT key simultaneous but didn't get the letter needed (an e with the ^ above it) I got nothing...What am I doing wrong, or what software do I need to make these Acronym's work on my keyboard?

Thanks........

[+ Hoover42]

You have to make sure NUMLOCK has been turned on for those codes to work.

 

Alternatively, you can use the charmap.exe program located in the windows or winnt directory instead which provides you with a list of all of the characters from which you can select.

 

...Hoover

[trilingual]

A gentle hint: Get a Mac. Accents are (and always have been) a breeze in the Mac world!

 

If you're typing a LOT of Portuguese on your PC, you can avoid all the ALT stuff by going to your START menu and then your settings or whatever it's called on a PC. Eventually you'll get to an option for Keyboards. Select a Brazilian Portuguese keyboard as well as a standard US English one (your current default, no doubt). Once you do that, you'll see a little blue box down in the lower right hand corner of your screen with the initials EN or PT in it. That tells you which keyboard is currently active. You can toggle between the keyboards by pressing control+shift (I think); the initials in the little blue box will change back and forth each time you press the correct key combination.

 

When you're in the Portuguese keyboard, the keys will start functioning as if they were on a standard Brazilian keyboard, meaning some of the keys will become "dead" keys with accents on them. (With a "dead" key, you have to type the accent first and then the letter that goes under it, at which point both will appear on your screen.) Once you're in the Portuguese keyboard, start hitting all the different symbol keys to see what characters they generate and make a list for yourself. Remember to repeat this holding down the shift key to see what characters are in the upper case. Also do this with the upper case number keys. The letter keys are the same in Portuguese and English, but the English semi-colon key becomes a Ç, for example, and the apostrophe/quotation key becomes a tilde/circumflex accent. The semi-colon moves above the comma, the colon above the period. I'm not sure where the question mark goes! When I had a PC at work I had to switch back and forth to the English keyboard to produce a question mark! But overall, once you've learned which key produces which character in the Portuguese keyboard, it's fast and easy to use and you won't have to remember all those ASCII codes.

[grweyers]

Hoover and Tri....

Thanks for the help..I will try the suggestions.

Greatly appreciated....