Windows: How to Enter Unicode Characters via the Keypad

If you’ve used Windows for any length of time you’re probably familiar with entering special characters with the ALT+ method. For example, to enter “É” — Latin Capital Letter E with Acute, Unicode code point U+00C9 — you can hold down the ALT key and while continuing to hold it down, type 0201 on the numeric keypad, then release the ALT key. It doesn’t take long before you’ve memorized the characters you use frequently.

There are some problems with this method. The original PCs used CP437 (code page 437) keyboard mapping for English. When Windows came along, CP1252 (code page 1252) began to be used for keyboard mapping. If you use the ALT+ method with a three-digit code (the first digit non-zero), for example, ALT+201, you get “╔”— Box Drawings Double Down and Right, Unicode code point U+2554 — the character at CP437’s code point 201. If you add a leading zero (0) and then the number, ALT+0201, you get “É”, the character at CP1252’s code point 201. Confusing, right?

When Windows made the transition to Unicode, there were attempts to extend this to allow entry of any Unicode code point. Some applications like Word 2010 or PSPad 4.5.6 interpreted ALT+ codes larger than 255 directly as a decimal Unicode code points, but other software interpreted such numbers modulus 256 (the remainder after dividing by 256), or ignored any digits after the third. Although CP1252 is almost identical to the start of Unicode, ALT+ method prevents entry of the Unicode code points from U+0080 to U+009F, and even more problematic, other ANSI code pages prevent entry of some very common Latin accented letters. In addition, most Unicode documentation show the code points in hexadecimal, not decimal. So a third method was developed to unambiguously enter Unicode.

The third method is not enabled by default in Windows. You have to set it up yourself.

To enable the third method, you need to set or create the registry key

with type REG_SZ and set the value to 1. Then you need to reboot your computer.

The following method can then be used to enter Unicode codepoints:

Hold the ALT key down, then type the + key on the numeric keypad, then type the hexadecimal number (using the numeric keypad for digits 0–9 and the normal keys for A–F), then release the ALT key.

For example, ALT++C9 will produce “É” — Latin Capital Letter E with Acute, Unicode code point U+00C9. You can enter the leading zeros of the hexadecimal or not. ALT++C9, ALT++0C9, and ALT++00C9 all produce “É”.

The transition to Unicode actually made the old legacy ALT+ codes (the ones with no leading zero) more reliable, as all the glyphs in the legacy code pages have matching glyphs in Unicode, so they all work.

To get you started, here are some characters from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block U+2600 to U+26FF. (You can also cut-and-paste these characters.)