How can I enter arbitrary ASCII codes in the absence of a keypad?

[DrHow]

See https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Insert-ASCII-or-Unicode-Latin-based-symbols-and-characters-...

Small laptops (like the Stream 11) have no keypad.  But, since keypad keys are truly different, there ought to be a way simulate a keypad key.  I tried the "fn" and "alt" modifers with the regular number keys.  No joy!

[WAWood]

DrHow

Wow -- ASCII codes!  Takes me back to the days when folks actually did interesting stuff with computers!

Sorry ... retired now and wax nostalgic about the "good old days"

But ... on to your problem ...

I found the following as an alternative way to enter ASCII codes:  http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/insert-a-special-character-into-a-document-ascii-co...

I tried it and it actually works!

Hope this helps.

Good Luck

I am a volunteer and I do not work for, nor do I represent, HP.
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[doughjohn]

Hi

This may be even older...

LotusWorks for DOS

Spreadshheet

Cell A1   =CHAR(ROW())  Doesn't really produce anything because it is listing the non-printing characters. Drag it down to 256 and you get the equivalent of CHARMAP.  Select the Font for that column.

Cell A1 =CHAR(ROW(+32)) starts at 33 !  and goes upto 223 ß

If you go across to Z223 you can change each column to a different font, so you can see all the DINGBATS etc and they will copy and paste properly providing the document supports that font.

Then you find and compare characters with accents etc.  Also if you have a keyboard (yeah I know)  the row number pretty much matches the ASCII number.

[DrHow]

Copy and paste will certainly work.  (Indeed, there is a good Web site for that which I long ago bookmarked.  It is actually even better than an extended ASCII solution, since it also provides Unicode characters.)  But that is not what I am looking for.  I only want to insert things like £, ¢, or, ².  Those were all easy with Alt and keypad, since I am on my desktop now.  The octal ASCII codes for common characters like those are worth memorizing.  But it does no good on my laptop unless there is a way to emulate keypad digits.

[DrHow · Accepted solution]

Well I found an open source solution in form of a keypad emulator: https://sourceforge.net/projects/numpad-emulator

It dawned on me that this lack of keypad emulation with small keyboards may not be HP-specific.  And, sure enough, there are general-purpose solutions.  I tried the above emulator, and it works fine!  Just thought I'd post the solution in case someone else with the problem finds my original question.