I don't have much need for these symbols and I find that the ones that I might use (degree, copyright, male, female,etc.) do work off the list I got here on this site. I copied the following extract from a Yahoo answer.
Note that while Quick Unicode Input Tool is running, the normal Alt-key method will not work, but since all the characters are available from Quck Unicode Tool, that really isnt a problem as long as you know their Unicode hexadecimal values.
To get ∞, since its Unicode code point value is U+221E, I would type Alt numeric-keypad-dot 2 2 1 e (without the spaces). This allows you to type any Unicode character from U+0000 to U+FFFF using either the hexadecimal number itself or its decimal counterpart.
What I think you should do is to download and install the free Quick Unicode Input Tool from. I consider Code and Code to be superior to Code in any case. You may also issue the command chcp 437 in a DOS window, but that only effects the appearance of DOS Windows using Windows fonts and will not effect characters you get using the Alt key. You should be asked to select a code page at some time during the install. You can change your DOS code page back to 437 if you want by reinstalling Windows. Web sites giving the values of Alt codes more often than not are produced by ignoramuses who have no idea about code pages or character sets.
Some installing programs make this change and some individuals make it because they feel that Code page 850 or Code page 858 better fits their use of the computer. So a file can more likely be translated from one to the other without losing information,
This is sometimes done because Code page 437 is missing accented characters that are usually thought to be more necessary in common business use and Code pages 850 and 858 contain all the characters from the ISO Latin-1 alphabet (although recoded) which was the basis of Code page 1252. You obviously have either Code page 850 or Code page 858 installed instead of Code page 437. When the Euro system was invented, Microsoft invented yet another DOS code page which they called 858 which was identical to Code page 850, except that it included instead of ı, the dotless i. In this code page character 236 has the value ý. The DOS code page that most closely resembles Windows code page 1252 was originally Code page 850. Windows Code page 1252 covers western European languages and is the normal Windows code page installed on computers where the language is set to a form of English.
īut Microsoft later invented other code pages for different languages or to be more similar to the Windows code page 1252. In this character set, character 236 is ∞. What it does make clear is that not all keyboard/character layouts are the same.Ĭode page 437 is the original MS-DOS character set on the PC. I copied the following extract from a Yahoo answers screen, some of it is interesting, some of it is understandable.