I use MS Windows with MS and Open Office products.

The first thing you need to do is this:

Check your Language Settings!

Go to 'Start' or 'My Computer' then 'Control Panel'

Find and Open 'Regional Language Options' !

Tick those 'Supplemental Language Support Options' if you're using any non western scripts!

Then Go to the 'Advanced' tab and again you'll see a list. Tick the boxs of every language you think you may be using now or in the future!

Whether you are just inserting a few characters or using a full word processing program or special font you will need this!

Done? Down to the next section!

Hope you didn't mind scrolling past the Cafe Press section? Gotta support those sponsors who support us! Okay back to the instructional stuff.

Know what the 'Menu' bar is? In your word processing program there should be a a tab or button or menu marked 'INSERT'. Open that and go down until you find a command called 'Symbols' or 'Characters' depending on your program. MS calls it 'Symbol'. Open Office calls it 'Special Characters'.

This is your gateway to all those hidden treasures!

Have you clicked on it?

There's a dialog box in which you can change 'FONTS' and scroll through 'SUBSETS'. The subsets differ from font to font. NOT ALL of them have FULL sets!

If you need Chinese characters scroll down thru the subsets and look for sets that have CJK as part of their name. Make sure you have a matching subset!
Explore!

Depending on your system there will be boxes at the bottom that let you select characters and tell you the unicode for the character! Neat hey?!

What you can find! Hangul, Kana, IPA symbols, Greek, Cyrillic, Diacritics and much more!

Do you know there are other ways than the dialouge box to get characters like &#5B57; added to your document?

字 is the Chinese character for the word "zi" which can be translated as sign or symbol!

Its Unicode is 5B57.

Using the Inkscape text function and Unicode you can generate characters and save them as images to insert in text. Thats' how I got the image at the top of the page! (If you have a browser thats Unicode and utf-8 compliant)

In hmtl you can add Unicode to the source code!

If you type 字 xhtml will turn it into a Unicode symbol or glyph.

Another method is to use hexadecimal codings like
&#e5ae87;

Important Disclaimer. Some servers and sites are not fully compliant with Unicode sometimes even if they do allow utf-8 instead of western european!

If you do not have a full font and do not want to be continually going in and out of the Symbol dialogue try this!

Need to insert only one or two special characters or frequently used words from non Roman scripts?

Start a new file. Create five blank lines in the font you plan to use for the whole article.

Move down to the middle line of those five blank lines. Move over a few spaces. Open the Symbol box and insert WITH A FEW SPACES BETWEEN EACH NEW character the characters you will be using most frequently. The spaces around the characters will make copy and paste easier.

Save these five lines as a template!

Now open a new file. Use the first line as your starting point and DO NOT DELETE the bottom lines with the special characters.

Every time you need to insert a special character or a one line or word quote say from Chinese or Greek cut and paste the characters from the bottom to your quote!

I have used this to insert IPA Old English French Cryllic Greek and other characters with diacritics and Chinese or Japanese into essays!

It's a tested technique that's a time saver!

Got questions?

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