You can insert special characters into a Word document:

• directly from your keyboard,

• using the Insert menu, or

• using the eXtyles Symbols menu.

Applies to all eXtyles products:

On this page

From the Keyboard

The first table below lists shortcut keys and ISO codes for commonly used special characters.

The second table lists shortcut keys and ISO codes for accented letters in the Latin alphabet.

Commonly used special characters

Accented Letters and other Special Characters

From Word’s Insert function

To insert special characters not listed in either of the previous tables:

1. Place your cursor at the location where you want to insert the character.

2. Choose Insert > Symbol.
   The Symbols tab displays a scrollable palette of characters, including accented letters and Greek letters. The Special Characters tab contains characters such as en dash and em dash.

3. Select the symbol or special character you need from one of the tabs and click Insert.

For some fonts, a Subset drop-down list appears, which lets you select a smaller character set within that font.

The first character in the subset is highlighted in blue. The subsets correspond to Unicode subdivisions.

From the eXtyles Insert Symbols menu

1. Open the Insert Symbols dropdown menu.

2. Choose the appropriate secondary menu item.

3. Choose your desired symbol or special character.

Inserting other special characters

Use the methods described here to insert them:

−

1. Type a hyphen character at the keyboard.

2. Select the character.

3. From the Format menu, select Font and change the typeface to Symbol.

∼

1. Type "223C". This is Unicode for the character ∼

2. Select the Unicode, and press Alt-X to toggle special character display.

Creating key commands for special characters

For frequently used special characters, consider creating a custom key command to speed things up!

As an example, here’s how you would assign the key command "Control-Shift-X" to insert the symbol χ:

1. Select Symbol from the Insert ribbon tab.

2. Highlight the χ symbol.

3. Click the Shortcut Key button.

4. When the Customize Keyboard dialog appears, place the cursor in the Press new shortcut key text box and press Ctrl-Shift-X on the keyboard.

5. Click the Assign button, then click Close twice.

Special characters and nonstandard fonts

eXtyles accurately retains special characters if the characters are correctly retained by Microsoft Word when it opens a document.

You are most likely to encounter special character problems when a document uses nonstandard fonts. eXtyles defines a standard font as one that:

1. Uses the same character set as Times New Roman but a different typeface (e.g., Arial, Courier, etc.)

2. Is a set of special characters for which special knowledge has been built into eXtyles (e.g., Symbol, Monotype Sorts, MT Extra, etc.)

Inserting a special character in a specific font

Use the following procedure to enter a special character (such as the plus/minus symbol, ±) in the Find or the Replace dialog:

1. Insert the symbol somewhere within the document by selecting eXtyles > Insert and clicking the appropriate symbol.

2. Cut the character and paste it into the Find or Replace dialog.

3. Use the following procedure if the replace string contains more than one character style (for example, if you are changing "CD8+" to "CD8+"):

4. Type in the replacement text somewhere within the document and format it as needed using the Font function of the Format menu.

5. Cut the text to the clipboard.

6. Open the Replace dialog. Click the More button.

7. Place the cursor in the Replace with text box of the Replace dialog, click the Special button, and select Clipboard Contents.