The Macintosh does it easy. Accented letters and symbols are made readily accessibly by using keyboard shortcuts available anytime you use a Mac. The PC? Well, you’re kinda screwed.

Drawing up accented character is a snap when you use Microsoft Office in Windows. The keyboard shortcuts make sense, and therefore they’re memorable.

For example, to put a ` (accent grave) over a vowel, type Ctrl+` and then type the vowel. Ta-da! There’s your character, à è ì ò ù. Amazing.

Now try that trick in your email program or on the web.

Doesn’t really work does it?

That’s because the Ctrl key prefix trick is unique to Microsoft Office. I’d like to see it available for all of Windows, but Microsoft apparently doesn’t believe in such consistency.

Instead, and traditionally on a PC, you can use the old Alt+Keypad trick.

Alt+Keypad is the name I’ve given an old technique for generating characters on a PC: Press and hold the Alt key, tap out a number sequence on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key. Ta-Da! The character represented by the code you typed appears.

Yes, that’s really a clunky way to do it, but it’s all you have.

Back in the Days of DOS, the PC was limited to only 256 characters, about 230 of which could be displayed on the screen. Today, thanks to the Unicode standard, thousands of characters are available. That’s nice, but it remains that you must know the character codes to type to make the trick remotely useful.

True, you can memorize a few of the codes, but that sucks. Therefore, to remedy the situation, I’ve provided a Wambooli Dispatch that illustrates how to access common accented characters and symbols. You can view the dispatch by clicking the link below.

http://www.wambooli.com/help/pc/unicode/

Ideally, of course, Windows should have a consistent interface for generating accented characters and symbols. A Character Map program exists, which is probably what Microsoft would argue is the best method, but it’s not keyboardy. Until a consistent keyboard solution is made available, I suppose all of us PC users will have to suffer.