Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I was trying to insert a non-ASCII character (accented æ) in Writer, but instead got ý. I entered the character code in decimal (hexadecimal didn't work at all). How do I enter non-ASCII characters without using the Insert Special Character dialog?

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide?

The answer depends on what system you're using and what version of OOo you have, which you have not told us.

System: Windows XP
OOo Version: 2.3.1

I doubt there's any keyboard available with this character (I'm typing Medieval Latin; no modern language I know of uses an accented a+e ligature). The macro idea will work for this particular problem, but I was hoping someone would know if OOo supports Unicode at all, and if it does how to set it up to do so. It's a possibility that it only supports Unicode entered in hexadecimal (I was trying decimal). I wasn't able to set Windows up to accept hexadecimal character codes, but that's obviously beyond the scope of this forum.

Of course OpenOffice supports Unicode. However, it does not support keyboard input via Alter + Decimal codepoint (beyond Alter 0255).

Macros are fine. If you prefer a system-wide method, then make your own keyboard with Microsoft's free Keyboard Layout Creator, as suggested in the above tutorial.

Opera browser can convert hex to unicode. 01FC 01FD Ǽ ǽ

Thank you. I guess a new keyboard layout is what I'll have to do. I was hoping there was an easier way. Oh well.

Problem solved.

OOo on Linux supports entering Unicode characters by their (hex) codes. I've learned about a half-dozen of the common ones.

I also often use the system character map utility rather than the OOo Insert > Special character dialog, because the system utility does not block my work in OOo, and I can simply drag characters from the map into Writer, or click on characters to assemble a string in the map and then copy/paste that into Writer.

I don't remember if the same trick works in Windows or not, but I expect it would.

Obviously none of that is as convenient as a real keyboard layout, but it does well enough for some uses and avoids the need for a custom keyboard map.