Ä-ß-Ç Easy as Alt 1-2-3

Today’s post is going to be short and sweet, non-huntery, and hopefully of some use. I’m helping to run a guild and as such I find myself needing to interact with more people, which includes offering up invitations to join our ranks.

Well it seems that over the years a lot of your favorite names have been taken up. Rather than abandon them many of you have chosen to replace the standard As, Bs, and Cs with all sort of crazy characters that can’t be found on a standard keyboard.

It was almost 1AM and I had a mage looking for a guild invitation. Their name started with a Ç, and I didn’t have a /tell or anything from which I could copy and past their name. Nope I was going to have to type this one in. I knew the how, but not the what for making this happen. After a few minutes of searching the internet I was able to find what I was looking for and extend the guild invitation. Crisis averted, sleep obtained.

You see all of these special characters have codes that can easily be typed while holding down Alt key. For example to type Ä, I would simply press Alt+142. Simple, but annoying. All you need is a list of characters and codes which can be found in a handy dandy source such as http://www.asciitable.com/.

Here’s a screenie taken from that site that lists some of basic ones.

7 Comments on “Ä-ß-Ç Easy as Alt 1-2-3”

  1. While these characters open up a wealth of options for character names, remember that a lot of people hate them because they don't know the code to create the character themselves. If you do choose to go this route, don't be surprised when you're passed up for invites because of this. Lame reason, but people do what they're going to do.

  2. @Morynne – just to be clear, I hate seeing these special characters, but they do exist and there does come a time where you need to type one out.

  3. Based on the title, I was almost expecting a post on changing your keyboard settings to the US-International layout. Using that, you can just type Right Alt + e for a é and so on. Much easier than remembering ascii codes, but it also affects what ' does (in order to get a ' on an international keyboard, you have to press space afterwards, otherwise you get an accented letter.)

  4. Cool post, i know that i'll be coming back to it from time to time, i've never understood why you would want any of those characters in your name….it just seems rather pointless to me XD

  5. Special characters can ĐĩāҒ.

    My favorite is when someone who has a special character in their name doesn't know the ALT+[number] to write it.

  6. A far easier alternative, I find, is using a chat addon like pratt or chatter. Using the /Who function then shift clicking the name from that to put a message in my chat box – then copy and paste.

    Then again we make the applicants come to us *evil grin*

  7. I prefer the whole "If you have high ASCII codes in your name, you're not joining my party/raid/guild" mindset, myself. 😛

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