Does anybody know how to use the advanced alt codes for special symbols? I've been looking through alt-codes.net and all of them that are listed as just plain numbers work fine, but as soon as special symbols are added to the code, I no longer understand how to input it. Here are 2 symbols they have listed together with the codes provided:
Circled Plus ⊕
Decimal: ⊕ Hex: ⊕
[...]
I assume the decimal code is the one to use, so I tried the following for the Circled Plus:
alt + 38 = &
alt + 35 = #
alt + 38358853 = E
alt + 8853 = ò
However, I'm now tempted to conclude that all the other symbols are not accessible via alt codes, and that the decimal / hex codes given are just for programmers to use.
Just to remove your misassumption, there is no 'translation' of "&#" to digits 3835 in the way you thought there was. Numpad codes are generally three or four digits (2-digits and singletons, typed during ALTing would be assumed to be in the non-hundreds range) with 3/2/1-digit numbers not starting with zero being taken as a wish to take from the DOS-style character list (Codepage 437, essentially the DF vanilla set) and zero-led numbers being serviced by the Windows default Codepage (different, but still limited in number).
I don't have my Windows machines in front of me, to test, but I suspect that if you put in more than the three or four digits (or just that many but stray into the 256+ range of number) it will truncate what you give it somehow, though how it gives you small-o-with-grave-accent (Alt-149 or Alt-0242, I think) from Alt-8853 I can't currently work out, and that's a higher number than I can convert to bitwise logic off the top of my head. Or Windows has radically changed its behaviour since I was most familiar with this process.
Once you start to see notation like "&#...;", that's probably (unless there is an 8-bit equivalen on that number or another) beyond your easy keying-in pleasure. For 'everyday' use you have to go hunting in charmap. Knowing either base of a character's number or at least part of its Unicode name should get you to it if it is present in any given font. If it isn't there[1] where you expect it then either check a different font or scroll through to see if there's a similar/identical symbol in there for a different purpose (then double check
that looks Ok in other fonts, in case serif/sanserif or other distinctions only make it right in a narrow family of fonts).
([1] - Don't go looking in Wingdings for anything not a Wingding, obviously. Most 'regular' fonts extend to service Cyrillic as well as all the obvious extensions in the Latinesque alphabets, but some do not. Arabic/etc alphabets will likely be missed from more hobbyist fonts from the 'western' world.Your required Circled-Plus symbol might be trivially added by a font-artist who has already decided what their normal mathematical Plus looks like when they get into mirroring the higher bytes of a font-table, or they may ignore the extended mathematical symbol area entirely (or is it the astronomical section, or a minority alphabet area for Tagalog/whatever?) once they're happy they've covered the areas they expect their work to be applied in.)
The &#...; format itself is typically used in web page sources, &...; is a "this is a meta" thing, like for non-breaking space (mostly used for non-contraction of multiple required spaces, rather than the use it is named for) or <> for 'literal' <>s not to be interpreted as. HTML tagging. The # with decimal digits of #x with hexadecimal ones, in the "..." spot is the Unicode/Universal-codepage reference which is often also given as U+ABCD with ABCD (or more or less than four characters, according to range needed) being the hex digits.
Only if it is U+00 and two more digits (or equivalently zero-padded) are you going to be likely to translate it to Alt-code (by decimalising), otherwise you may have to be lucky and find it's an effective duplicate of a semanticly different character, as mentioned already. A very simple example is that a hyphen is technically not the same as a minus sign, neither of which is an en-dash, but all
probably look like that dash character I just used, for most (visual) purposes, even if you can't use the trivial lower-ASCII character straight off the keyboard for some reason.
The U+25BA, that you mention, is officially the BLACK RIGHT-POINTING POINTER, while Alt-16 is in the Control Character set in the very lowest section of the 8-bit or perhaps even 7-bit sets (YMMV), which may or may not even print out or act as you expect in various entry modes. It may display as the arrow/triangle, or the software you are entering it into may assume you mean Shift Out or Data Link Escape, depending on age, or else beep/flash/tooltip at you for daring to try to use it, and if you
actually want to use the control-code it represents you may have needed to press Ctrl-N, in software old enough to probably not be something you want to use that also doesn't trap that code as "New file..." or similar.
Obviously if you can use Alt-16 easily enough and it survives the process of arriving where you want it to be seen, then use that. But sometimes incompatible systems mess these things up. For example, here in the UK we use the £ symbol for GBP/Pounds Sterling, but due to various early localisations of the early incarnations of ASCII it might or might not render as the # symbol on other displays. (That's the "hash" symbol, to many. Or octothorn/octothorpe to others, as the eight-pointed version from the stylised "th"-digraph. Ironically also called the "pound sign" but that's from a different super-struck version of the digraph of "lb", used in pounds-weight context.). The modern HTML standard is to use £ to render it, though, which should solve everything. Except when you get text transferred 'safely' between systems that renders the & itself as the 'safe' version of & which
in turn is mishandled, then you end up with text on job vacancy aggregators (a common place to be fed by feeds fed on other feeds that have themselves harvested other feeds, all with dodgy scripting behind their scraping of other sources) such as "Position earns &amp;gt;&amp;pound;30K p.a. &amp; car &amp; benefit&amp;rsquo;s" (Sic)...
But I'm sure you're well beyond your initial problem now. Consider this all as just fun new information (E&OE) that you might find useful on some future occasion...
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