To TYPE Unicode characters

Question

Hi!
I use FrameMaker 8 on Windows XP.
I have scanned a two-volume Greek book and ran it through an OCR program. Not all of the transcription is correct, so I have to fix it. Some of the text is quoted from older books, so there's a lot of interesting combinations of diacritical marks, creating special characters. Most of them I have found in the font I use (Alkaios) and have no big trouble typing them with the corresponding key combinations.
Running charmap from the Run... field under Start I can see that also the rest of the characters are present in the Alkaios font. But I don't seem to find the combination of keys in FrameMaker to produce them (and probably those particular combinations are not implemented). And I can't use Alt+number, since that only works with ASCII characters, and the ones I'm after are far beyond those.
Searching the web, I found that what I'm supposed to type is U+number. The problem is that in any editor, typing a 'U' will present me with a 'U'. (Very logical and practical, since you sometimes also want to be able to type a 'U'!) Searching some more, I found that in for example OpenOffice the 'U' in the typing sequence should be translated as Ctrl+Shift (haven't tried it there, though), and I also found another editor in which it works that way. And in Word 2007 I actually CAN use Alt+number (the decimal numbers 0912 and 0944, in this case).
But in FM I can't use Alt+number, because I get a question mark or a ring, or something else. And I can't use Ctrl+Shift+number, because when I hit the zero key, FM tries to copy whatever is highlighted in the document (which i nothing, and hence FM protests).
As you've probably guessed by now, I would like to know what key combination (or other trick) I have to use to be able to somehow type or enter the special characters into my document? Or am I stuck with copy-and-paste from the charmap?
Regards, Mikael Persson!

Answer 1

I think using the Windows calculator is a perfectly acceptable way to convert between hex and decimal :)
Here's another issue:
there are two stages to getting a unicode character to display: you have to specify the correct character, and then the font involved has to actually have a glyph for that character in it.
I expect, to put it rather anthropomorphically, it goes something like:
1. you type/paste the character
2. Application asks the font if it has a glyph for that character
3. If not, application asks operating system if it has a font that has that character
4. Once one is found, it gets displayed.
My hunch from what I've seen is that applications like Word, and most web-broswers these days, will liase with the Windows operating system until a font is found that has the necessary glyphs for the required characters.
However, some applications give up at step two: if, for example, your doc in some Adobe application is using Helvetica, and you ask for a very obscure unicode character, and Helvetica doesn't have a glyph for it, you may just get a blank square or "Missing character" symbol.
This used to also be the case with the Firefox browser - if I was writing a webpage and put in an obscure character, which wasn't present in default fonts like "Times New Roman" or "Verdana", I'd get a missing character symbol instead, even though my PC had other fonts which *did* have glyphs for that. I'd need to explicitly put "font="Arial Unicode" or sthg like that into the webpage to make it talk to windows to retrieve a glyph.
However, over the past couple of years, Firefox has stopped this and will just go get whatever glyphs it needs.
Perhaps programs like Frame and InDesign actually see this kind of behaviour as a virtue?
(All the above is totally speculative based on my own experience, mind you...)