¶ is Alt0182 & wider dash is Alt0150

For those of you who like dashes and prefer the wider dash instead of the single minus sign that works now, you can get a slightly wider dash by: while holding down Alt key input 0150 from numeric pad, you'll get this – which is a couple of hair widths wider than the single dash - , see – ?

But the really wide dash Alt0151 doesn't work, it makes you [INVALID] . . . . ¶ So there you have it, so far the workarounds are Alt0182 gets you a paragraph mark ¶ and Alt0150 gets you a slightly wider dash – . . . . ¶ whooopeee, does it get much better than this?!

I've been using the alt codes to type umlauts for years. But they are also on the Charmap; if you use the Office toolbar, you can add the character map to it and just call it up whenever you want to insert (copy/paste) a special character. BTW, € is <alt>0128.               ¶ I tried <alt>013 which should be a <CR>, but it didn't work.

Norm: Yep, apparently the word c o p y (and some other words) are interpreted by the site software as an attempt to inject HTML coding or commands, which are no longer allowed, so you get the [INVALID] output. . . . . ¶ Note that you can use the verboten words, if you space after each letter, as in c o p y.

"Alt0182". Hold down the Alt key and type 0182 on the numberic keypad.

Thanks. How in the world did you figure this out?

Lee started doing it yesterday, so he gets the credit. I was going to PM and ask him, but before I did that, I Googled and got this webpage: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html#punc, and I already knew that the 0182 had to be input on the numeric key pad while holding down the Alt key. Voila. . . . . ¶ I also adopted his convention of dots preceding the ¶ and a space after. . . . . ¶

For those of us without a separate numeric keypad on the right side of the keyboard, you can also [INVALID] the para mark by using the "character map," which is usually found under something like Start, Programs Accessories, System tools in Windows. [INVALID] it, copy it, then paste ¶ it into your copy

Sorry.. the word "c o p y" appears to return an invalid error on the website.

Wow, this has become complex!! I don't like that you can't use words like c o p y. I hope they have a f i x in place pretty soon!

Kent, I also noticed the ¶ that Lee was using. What a great idea! For those that are using Mac's, Alt. + 7 will produce the paragraph symbol. Alt. + Shift + 2 produces the € symbol (it's easy compared to a PC).

Alt + 250 (Alt-hyphen on a Mac) is an en dash, with its own lovely arcane uses. Not that it matters.

But, but.... Norm's 11:58 post uses the word "copy" twice without putting spaces in it... I'm confused...

Maybe if we typed in pig latin?

or backwards! I am willing to give it a go in German to see if the software recognizes the words.

Nancy...it might be the browser you are using. The word comes up as INVALID on IE 8.

I appreciate this forum as a resource but hope that those in charge would consider an upgrade. The software used here is old and obsolete. If more modern software was used (like vBulletin) it would be much more helpful and allow for proper posting of links, pictures, youtube clips, etc. It is crazy that a forum with this amount of traffic has to have threads like this.

The word "copy" comes up INVALID in one point of that post, but not in subsequent uses of the word. Weird. And I AM using IE 8, so it's not that. LL, while you are probably right that the system needs an upgrade, this problem only began a week or so ago. In all of the years I have been on the board, we haven't had this problem before.

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Kevin, don't blame the pig latin comment on me! Talk to arenkay.

I've used alt + keypad codes for umlauts for a long time, but with the "new" Helpline some of the codes (like alt 0214 for umlauted capital "O" and alt 0246 for lower case "o") just kick me out of the reply. A few still work, like ß, ü and ä, and others don't do anything but create a space.