Saturday, August 06, 2005

Input strange words in EndNote

Several weeks ago I was asked to tell a librarian how to keyin those strange words into EndNote (if I found how to do that), and finally I find the way today. Following is how I do that. My working environment is EndNote6.0.2 on M$ WinblowsXP. Journal pdf This is the journal article I'd like to build in my EndNote. Here I'd call the strange O with two dots on it "mouse head". How to keyin the two red-squared strange letters? Direct keyin Normally we can't keyin those strange characters through keyborad. Otherwise it'd end up like this... Character Map "Character Map" is what I'm going to use. Normally this small program should have been installed in any versions of M$ Winblows. Launch it by [Start]->[All Programs]->[Accessories]->[System Tools]->[Character Map]; alternatively, it can also be launched by typing "charmap" in the [Start]->[Run] dialog. It looks like the mouse head is on the lower left corner, but it's just too small to see. Try to click on it then Image hosted by TinyPic.com Bingo, it's exactly the mouse head. Click on [Select]->[copy]... PS: Note that the keystroke (which means how you should type on your keyboard if you really want to) is also shown. In this case, hold [Alt] key on, type 0246 (the number key on the right hand side of you keyboard; not the ones in front of the alphabet keys), then release the [Alt] key. Image hosted by TinyPic.com ...and then paste in EndNote (you know how to do this, don't you?) Finally the mouse head appears in my EndNote! Image hosted by TinyPic.com The second strange character (the odd "i") can also be typed into EndNote in the same way. Make sure you delete the previous character (in this case, the mouse head) before choose the second one; otherwise you'd choose both two characters rather than the second one (as you see in the picture, mouse head and odd "i"). So far so good. So we can keyin any strange item that can be found in the Character Map within this way, isn't it? Unfortunately not. Keep reading. Image hosted by TinyPic.com The word "alpha" is quite common in our daily use. Let's try if we can type the simble alpha into EndNote. Here we exactly can find it on the Character Map. However, no keystroke is shown. Does it make any difference? As usual, [Select]->[Copy] and then paste into a new EndNote document and then... Image hosted by TinyPic.com Alas!! It just shows up a question mark rather than a simbolic alpha! Why is that? ...Actually it's understandable - it's a matter of computer code. Image hosted by TinyPic.com Click on the "Advanced View" check box, we can notice that the character set is Unicode. Those ASCII style softwares (i.e. those can just handle pure text file) such as notepad and sadly, Endnote can't handle this kind of code. Otherwise other unicode-supporting softwares like M$ Word, OpenOffice can show this simbolic alpha without any problem. Image hosted by TinyPic.com To know which characters can be pasted into EndNote (or other ASCII text editors), switch the character set into "Windows: Western". Those listed in the table are are what we can use.

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