Mike Ayers asked: "On Windows, it is well known that you can generate a character from its code point by holding down the alt key and typing the code point in decimal, with a leading 0, on the numeric keypad. I recall that there is also a method to do this in reverse - given a character on, say, Wordpad, one can get the Unicode codepoint for that character (copied to the clipboard, I believe). However, I have forgotten how to do this. Can anyone help me out here?" ________________________________
It's true that in WordPad you can type in the decimal value of a Unicode (UTF-32) character value and insert the character. This is valid for programs that use RichEdit 3.0 or later for editing. But you can often use a better method with RichEdit controls, the Alt+x method, which uses hexadecimal characters and is editable on the fly. This works as follows: You type a character's hexadecimal code (in ASCII), making corrections as need be, and then type Alt+x. Presto! The hexadecimal code is replaced by the corresponding Unicode character. The Alt+x can be a toggle (as in Microsoft Word 2002-2003). That is, type it once to convert the hex code to a character and type it again to convert the character back to a hex code. If the hex code is preceded by one or more hexadecimal digits, you need to "select" the code so that the preceding hexadecimal characters aren't included in the code. The code can range up to the value 0x10FFFF, which is the highest character value in the 17 planes of Unicode. The only problem with this approach is that some programs use Alt+x for something else (like quit) or the keyboard doesn't have direct access to ASCII alphabetics. For such programs you can use the "secret" toggle Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F12 instead of Alt+x (only works with RichEdit, i.e., not with Word). Murray
