Re: Typing dots under words in English


"Lisa" <lisa@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1143818418.159953.89040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Fiona Abrahami wrote:
"Lisa" <lisa@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
Art Werschulz wrote:
"Lisa" <lisa@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I use MS Word for my creative typing. Sometimes, I need to type an
\s\
or an \h\ or a \k\ or a \t\ with a dot beneath it. See, that's the
convention used to represent an emphatic s, k or t (tzadi, quf, tet)
or
a het.

I can do macrons over words. I can do diareses and acute and grave
accents. I can do cedillas under s and c. But I can't do a dot
under
a letter.

Is there a trick? Do I have to use another font in order to do it?
Can I use a Hebrew chirik?

The best thing I've come across is to use an underline in such
circumstances, rather than an underdot. This is what I use for a
transliterated het when I'm producing a document that's not plain
text.

Actually, someone e-mailed me the answer. You hold down the alt key
and type 0803 on the number pad. I'm used to doing that kind of thing
for accented letters. Like alt 0252 being ü and alt 246 being ö.
(If that doesn't show up for some of you, it was a u with a diaresis
and an o with a diaresis).

Which is cool to know. Unicode is your friend.

What if you don't have a number pad (e.g. like on my laptop)? Alt
[regular
number key] doesn't do anything.

I'm not sure you can do anything in that case. Um... I don't know if
you've ever played with macros, but you could do this. Go into the
editor (alt-F11) and make a little macro like this:

Sub UwithMacron()
Selection.InsertAfter (ChrW(363))
Selection.Move
End Sub

You can make one for each character you want to be able to enter. For
the dot, it'd be this:

Sub DotUnder()
Selection.InsertAfter (ChrW(803))
Selection.Move
End Sub

If Fiona follows this method, then Lisa will have, in effect,
turned Fiona into a Visual Basic programmer, or at least a
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) developer.

All the methods discussed so far have their downsides.
Typing out the Unicode values of characters is obviously
inconvenient. Using the Character Map requires that
one engage in copying and pasting, and while the
Character Map on my machine seems to have all
the characters that have been under discussion here,
that may not be true for everyone. Using macros,
requires that one write a VB function for each character
one wants to use, and then customizing your toolbar,
to create hot-keys which will call these functions.
However, once one has gone through the trouble of
creating those macros and hot-key combinations, then
that's probably going to be the easiest to use when one
is actually typing text.


Then right-click in your toolbars and pick customize. Go to the
Commands tab, and click the Keyboard button. Pick Macros from the
category list, and pick your macro from the Macros list. Pick a
hot-key combination you'd like to be able to use for it, and you're
done. It's convoluted, but if you don't have a number pad, that's
probably the best you can do.

Lisa




.