Special Character Display Issue (Bullets)

BGaudreault-EDR

Hello, when I type the special “bullet” character • (typed with Alt+0149) it gets replaced by (looks like “SO” on a black background). I can copy and paste the special character properly. Font is stilll defaulted to “Courier New”. It seems like all other special characters display properly when typed with the Alt+#### method, so I think the issue is related to this 1 character. How can I fix this?

PeterJones

If your finger slips off the ALT key too early, Alt+0149 might be interpreted as Alt+014, which is the ASCII#14 (the SO control character). I can successfully type either Alt+014 or Alt+0149 and get either the SO character or the • bullet, as I intend.

For entering characters from the “extended ASCII”, if you are having troubles with the ALT-combos, you might try Edit > Character Panel and double-clicking the row you want from the popup/frame that appears as a result.

I also recommend easy acccess to the windows charmap.exe. (The charmap tool makes it easy to insert special characters, even when you don’t remember their Alt-sequence.) I accomplish easy access to charmap by adding the following line to the “UserDefinedCommands” section of %AppData%\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml:

    <Command name="CharMap" Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="yes" Key="67">charmap</Command>

To add that line from within notepad++: 1) Close all open Notepad++ windows. 2) Open a single Notepad++ window. 3) File > Open %AppData%\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml. 4) Edit the file. 5) Save and close the file. 6) Close Notepad++. 7) Start brand new instance of Notepad++. (RESULTS): Your Run menu should now have a CharMap entry with the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C. If you don’t like that shortcut, or have a shortcut conflict, go to Run > Modify/Delete Shorcut, which will open the Shortcut Mapper dialog on the Run Commands tab; you can use that interface to Modify or Clear the CharMap shortcut.

Scott Sumner

@PeterJones

I would recommend using the Run… menu facilities to create a charmap entry (safer, less error-prone for the noob):

Invoke the Run top-level menu
Choose Run… and a window with the title Run… will appear
In The Program to Run type charmap
Press the Save… button and the Shortcut window will appear
In the Name box type Charmap
Click OK (still in the Shortcut window)
Click Cancel (this is in the Run… window)

After this one-time sequence, Charmap will appear as a choice when you click the top-level Run menu.

PeterJones

Yes, Scott’s way is easier. (That’s probably how I originally created the charmap entry, and had just forgotten.)