Alt+xxx characters

["Terrell Prudé Jr."]

Riana Carstens wrote:
> I have a Dell Latitude notebook, but cannot get special characters by
> using the Alt + xxx keys. I read a lot, got advice but no joy.
> Anybody out there to help me??
> Regards,
>   

That's a DOS/Windows trick from way, way back that still works even in
Vista.  :-)

There are a couple of ways to do it.  Since I often type in Spanish,
which uses accented characters and the "~" over the n, I just pop open a
terminal window and type

  setxkbmap us_intl

after which you can type the apostrophe and an e, and get the accented
e.  If you want to go back, just type

  setxkbmap us

and you'll be back to vanilla ol' white-bread gringo mode.  :-)

The other way is to run a program like KCharSelect.  It'll give you
every character you want.  It's pointy-and-clicky, so it's slower than
Alt-XXX, but it works.  KCharSelect comes as part of KDE, and IIRC,
there's a similar program for GNOME desktops.

--TP