windows 7 - Find Alt-code for any character

07
2014-07
  • Tomáš Zato

    Sometimes, an alt-code that I find on the internet does not work on my PC, for example Pi alt code (Alt+227) throws Ń isntead of π.
    So I need to use the character in clipboard (or in a file or wherever) and conver it to Alt-code compatible with my system. Is this possible?

    • Answers
  • Jukka K. Korpela

    The Alt code are system-dependent: they depend on the local of the system. In some situations, it also depends on the application software. An Alt number code works consistently only when number is less than 127.

    General info: How to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows.

  • Rik

    You can start "Character map", choose your font, search you character and at the bottom (in the status bar) is the Alt code you need.

    (In Windows 7 you can press Start and begin type Character map en choose it at the top.)

    The fact that you get a different character with Alt + 227 is probably that you're using a different font. So choosing the right font in "Character map" is important.

    BTW nowadays the Alt combinations consists of a 4 digit number to accommodate a wider range of Unicode characters. The three numbers still work but the Alt + 227 is different from Alt + 0227.

    Character map

  • MSalters

    Alt codes only work up to 255. There's a slight trick: adding a lead 0 will give you consistent results. Alt-0227 consistently is ã. But since Alt codes only work up to 0255, it's clear that the thousands of characters needed for Chinese, Korean, Russian, Greek, etc. can't all be supported. The only greek character I found was Alt-0181 µ (mu).


    • Related Question

    unicode - Cannot copy non-latin characters from PDF document
  • UpTheCreek

    I have a pdf file which contains some non-latin european characters. If I copy some text with the highlight tool, and paste it into another program (word, notepad) - the 'special' characters do not transfer correctly (I get other odd characters in their place).

    I have tried copying the text from both Acrobat Reader and Foxit.

    Is there anything I can do here to copy this?

    Thanks


    • Related Answers
  • Hariram

    Perhaps,in the latest version of Pdf writer, Unicode text cannot be embedded as code points, only glyphs of the open type fonts are embedded in the pdf document.

  • Chris Fynn

    Normal PDF documents containing Unicode text do not store the text as characters - but as references to the glyphs (letter shapes) in the fonts used. When embedding fonts in a PDF document Unicode fonts are also often converted by Acrobat to several smaller fonts - so, even if you use only one font, these references may be to glyphs in several smaller fonts not to the glyphs in the original font.

    When cutting and pasting Unicode text from Acrobat to another application, Acrobat needs enough information to reconstruct the Unicode characters from the letter shapes. If the font used has glyphs named accoring to the Adobe Glyph Naming Convention then Acrobat can parse these names (which are also stored in the PDF document) and reconstruct the Unicode text. Unfortunatly, there are many Unicode fonts, including the standard Windows fonts, which do not follow this convention - so this may not be possible.

    Tagged PDF files also ensure reliable translation of text into Unicode -so you should be able to cut and paste Unicode text from a Tagged PDF file.

    So, if you want to prevent this problem in future, when crating a PDF from a document containing non-Latin Unicode text always generate the PDF file as a Tagged PDF and try to use only fonts which have been created with glyphs named accoring to the the Adobe Glyph Naming Convention. Doing this will ensure that your Unicode PDF documents are searchable and that texr can be reliably cut and paste text from them.

  • Emil

    The most likely answer is that the text in the PDF document does not contain the right characters. What you see isn't necessarily what you get with PDF, the text that you copy from and the image that you see are two different things, and in many cases that text is just an OCR reading of the image, which probably doesn't recognize the non-latin characters.

  • EJP

    It sounds like it could be an encoding issue. Make sure that both files are set to a Unicode encoding (probably UTF-8). I'm not entirely sure how to do this in Acrobat Reader, but Notepad and Word allow you to set this.

    See http://www.text-editor.org/encoding.htm for more info on encoding.

  • skibulk

    I had a Chinese PDF from which I could not copy and paste the characters using Adobe Reader. I found success however by opening the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional, rather than in Reader.