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**Katie Wasserman** · (This post was last modified: 12-21-2013 10:19 PM by Katie Wasserman.)

Quote:Hmmh, let me try my old-fashioned way: ± works with ALT 0177 (no '+' ! Katie, are you sure about the '+' ?).

I'm pretty sure. ALT 0177 is actually reading the 177 (decimal) character form the current code page (that's what the leading 0 means). The default code page for Windows is 1252 and ± is the 177th character. Unicode allows you to access a massive number of characters directly in hex. The format +0000 to +FFFF allows access to the "Phase 0" (basic multilingual plane).

To enter ± in Unicode you'd enter ALT +00B1.

A common problem is that holding ALT and pressing A, B, C, D, E or F brings up various menus depending on the browser you're using. One interesting (but slow) way around this is to run the Windows Character Map program (run 'charmap'). In there you can type in the unicode number. You can even type in the name of the character, like 'sigma' and it will find it for you. It's pretty nifty, but slow.