Inserting special characters

Some characters, such as the copyright sign, the degree sign and the accented characters used in some languages, cannot be entered into text directly with the keyboard. With Write, you can easily insert these special characters into the text via the built-in character table.

To do so, proceed as follows:

1.	Open the dialog box via the ribbon command Insert \| Symbol (in the group Text) by clicking directly on the icon.

Tip: If you click on the icon's arrow rather than directly on the icon itself, a small selection of the last used special characters will open for quick use. If you click on More here, you will open the dialog box again.

2.	The dialog box displays all characters available in the currently selected font. You can select a different font from the dropdown list Font if necessary.

3.	You can use the dropdown list Set to jump to a specific section of the character set. For example, you can select Cyrillic to view the Cyrillic characters (provided the selected font contains such characters).

Note: Many fonts contain only a few of the available character sets. A particularly large reservoir of characters is available in the standard fonts supplied with your operating system. In Windows, for example, these include such fonts as Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman.

4.	Select the character to insert with the arrow keys and press Enter↵ or double-click on the character to insert it into the text.

Tip: If you know the Unicode of the character you want to insert (for example, 20AC for the Euro sign €), you can enter it in the Code field. The program will then jump directly to the corresponding character.

5.	You can now insert more characters in the same way or exit the dialog box with the Close button.

Tip for Windows users: Most versions of Windows include two icon fonts named Symbol and Wingdings. These fonts contain numerous useful symbols (phone symbols, bullets, etc.).

Using shortcut keys

If you need to insert a special character frequently, you can always give it a shortcut key. The advantage of doing so is that you can then apply the character very quickly with one press of a key.

To assign a shortcut key to a special character, proceed as follows:

1.	Choose the ribbon command Insert \| Symbol to open the dialog box.

2.	Select the special character to which you want to assign a shortcut key.

3.	Click on the Change button next to the option Shortcut key.

4.	Another dialog box appears. In the Press new shortcut key input field, press the desired key combination (starting with Ctrl or Alt).

We recommend that you always use key combinations that include the keys Ctrl and Shift since they are not usually assigned. If you press a key combination that is already assigned, its current assignment will be displayed just below the Press new shortcut key input field. You should then press the Backspace keyÕ to delete your shortcut key and use a different key combination. Otherwise, you will overwrite the key combination of another Write command.

5.	Don't forget: Click on Add to assign this shortcut to the character.

6.	Confirm with OK and exit the main dialog box with Close.

From now on, you can insert this special character into the text by pressing the relevant key combination.

Note: The shortcut key only remembers the selected character but not the selected font.

Inserting special characters via their character code

There is another method for inserting special characters: by typing in its hexadecimal character code (Unicode) and then pressing the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X.

If, for example, you type 20AC and then press this key combination, you will get a euro sign € because it has the character code 20AC in the Unicode character table.

Tip: The Unicode value will be displayed in the aforementioned dialog box when you click on a special character.

Inserting special characters via Alt + numeric keypad

Here is yet another method for inserting a special character, via its ASCII code: Press and hold down the Alt key and enter the respective sequence of numbers (only possible via the numeric keypad!). Please also ensure that the numeric keypad is enabled by pressing the Num key.

If, for example, you type Alt+0128, you will obtain a euro sign € as soon as you release the Alt key.

Tip: You can display the ASCII code of a special character in Windows via the search term "Character map".

Applying selected formatting and special characters via the "Character" icon

The ribbon command Insert | Character (in the group Text) opens a dropdown menu with some special formatting and special characters, such as:

▪Soft hyphen / non-breaking hyphen: see Hyphenation

▪Non-breaking space: see Paragraph control

▪Dashes and spaces of different widths

▪Ellipsis and some other useful special characters.

Tip: If you click on the icon on the far right of the character in the dropdown menu, you can assign your own shortcut key to the character.

For more information on changing the keyboard mapping, see Customizing shortcut keys. You can edit the shortcut keys for special characters described in this section by selecting the "Characters" entry in the upper left list Categories in the dialog box.