I've been exchanging "text only" e-mails of technical context recently, and had others ask how I manage to incorporate Unicode symbols. There are several way, but the best I've found is this:
It works as advertised, but is not that intuitive and not documented.This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I just love these little gizzmos:
Special Characters Menu delivers on-demand special characters insertion within any application.
It runs invisibly in the background, activated by Win+C global hotkey. You can build your own list of "special" characters like µ ‰ ® √ as well as text blocks. Just click your selection from the popup and it's inserted. Also good for bold, italic etc. tag pairs here on the Lounge. Very small, lightweight and non-intrusive.
Download at http://e-cat.nm.ru/SpecChar.zip - only 27KB andof course!
ADVANCE WARNING! - It will "steal your Winkey + C shortcut key - this feature is unfortunately not configurable.
You build up your own character set from the simple .ini file provided. Mine looks like this: The popup looks like this: There are "special" characters used in the .ini file:
{} braces enclose a block of characters for insertion - {≈ 0} will insert "≈ 0" at the cursor position in the text.
^ caret determines where the caret will be stationed after insertion - {β = ^ m ºC⁻¹} will leave the cursor to the right of the equals sign, ready to type in a number.
| pipe gives a separator bar between character groups or sets displayed in the popup, as you wish.
A carriage return in the .ini file starts a new column in the popup display. My display has 18 columns.
You will need to save the chars.ini file as Unicode encoded, using "Save As..." in Notepad, if you want it to retain the unicode characters.
How to get the characters "in" in the first place? You can use Windows Charmap application, or hunt on Wikipedia etc. for what can be copy/pasted. Or you can "borrow" mine.
Alan
But there was only sparse documentation there anyway, hence my somewhat lengthy coverage of the app.
