Access of special characters

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Author: Shawn T. Rutledge
Date:  
Subject: Access of special characters
On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 11:14:30AM -0700, Robert N. Eaton wrote:
> Thanks for the tips, but what I have in mind is, as I know the octal,
> decimal, and hexadecimal addresses of the special character, how can I
> access that address from the keyboard? So much _is_ possible: why
> shouldn't that be? Or do I have to be in C++ mode to do it? (I do as
> little code as necessary ;-))


An old trick that used to work in DOS was to hold down Alt and then
_quickly_ type the 3-digit decimal ASCII code on the numeric keypad,
and then release Alt. I don't know if it works in Linux; might be a
keyboard firmware thing, or a DOS thing, I'm not sure which.

If you only want to view the entire codepage, try this:
http://gw.kb7pwd.ampr.org/rusdict/codepage.phtml
but it attempts to get the browser to use the KOI8 codepage. Netscape
usually isn't smart enough to do that, unless you take extra steps;
so you'll probably see European characters instead of the Cyrillic
ones. You can save the HTML and then you'll have a page you can use
as a reference. And, you can select a character with the mouse and then
middle-click to paste it into anything.

Note that shells usually don't accept extended ASCII characters without
magic incantations which so far have escaped me (err, maybe I need to
escape them, or something); the ones that are reported to work don't
work for me, and I'm not sure if it's because Gnome-terminal isn't
being cooperative, or what. It works in some versions of vi, but other
versions will escape those characters. Nedit also works well. GTK
text fields accept them with no problems too.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  
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