how to add language symbols in word 2010

#How to add language symbols in word 2010 how to#
#How to add language symbols in word 2010 free#
#How to add language symbols in word 2010 windows#

September 2018: Anik8G, a commenter on this post, shared his solution and it’s super easy. I’ve used Word 2007 in these instructions, but Word 2003 and later versions of Word is similar for the most part.

#How to add language symbols in word 2010 how to#

The methods below show how to create your own letter with a macron (I’ll use D as the example).

#How to add language symbols in word 2010 windows#

Check the Windows Character Map ( Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map on Vista) or use a program such as BabelMap to see if there’s an existing character you can use - if there is, use that as it’s the quickest and simplest method. If your letter doesn’t have an existing character ( D doesn’t), you’ll have to create it yourself, which is what the rest of this article is about. Please note: Some letters already have a macron built-in. Armed with that little piece of information, back to Google, where I found out more about this beastie. I Googled the problem and after some hunting around I discovered some great resources (listed at the end of this post), and discovered that the line over the top of a letter is called a ‘macron’.

will you have to copy from one document to another? is the method easy for you to use/remember? do you have to create a lot of these? is the font important?). In fact, there are several ways and the method you choose should be the one that gives you the result you’re looking for, taking into account your circumstances (e.g. I confirmed that copying the D with the overbar was problematic when I used the equation editor, so I figured there had to be another way to get a line on top of a letter. So she asked me.Įquations are one of the few areas in Word that I’ve never tackled, so, as I told Steph, it was all a new experience for me. She could get the line using Microsoft Word’s equation editor, but as she had to define what the D with the overbar/overline/overscore meant, she wanted to insert it into the Terms list too. So, what’s a macron? It’s a bar or line over the top of a word or letter, such as those used to indicate the mean in mathematical equations.Īnd why did I learn this word? Because Stephanie, one of my team’s authors, wanted a line over the top of her capital D.

#How to add language symbols in word 2010 free#

That’s not a problem with most commercial fonts which should have a wide range of characters but some free or fancy fonts might be limited to letters and simple punctuation.I learnt a new word the other day: macron. Keep in mind that the font you use has to include the characters you’re trying to enter. For example some keyboards will have the Euro, Pound or Yen symbols included. While the basic QUERTY layout is fixed there can be regional variations to make typing in other languages easier. Other CharactersĪrmed with one or several of the above options you can enter other characters that are not on most English based keyboards. Anywhere in Windows you can insert any character by typing the decimal character number (as four digits, for example ‘ 0133’ or ‘ 0128 ‘) on the keyboard number pad (not the numbers above the letters) while holding down the Alt key.Īnother option is to enter the symbol in Word and copy it from there to the other program.įinally, for the sake of completeness, on web pages you can use special HTML to enter any character once you know the decimal or hexadecimal character reference. For the Numero character enter № (decimal) or № (hexadecimal). Check the page encoding setting to make sure it includes the characters you’re entering. Outside of Microsoft Office you have the Windows accessory Character Map which is the operating system equivalent of Insert Symbol. Most characters used in western languages are in the ASCII 255 character range but some like Numero and ‘Care of’ are in the extended Unicode set.

The reason for the two systems is the growing size of character sets. Early computers used the ASCII character set of 255 symbols which is enough for most western languages. These days we have the Unicode character set which has the potential for more than 100.000 characters – at that size it’s more convenient for programmers to work in hexadecimal. Be careful about which numbering system applies to a character number – character sets can use decimal (base 10) or hexadecimal (base 16). Sometimes it’s obvious because there are letters in the number (eg 00AB) but other times it’s not ( 2116 is hexadecimal for the Numero symbol not decimal).