How do I type the Spanish inverted question mark in Emacs?

Question

I want to write in Spanish without having to keep Charmap open ! How do I type the Spanish inverted question and exclamation marks ?

¡ Quiero escribir en Castellano sin usar el charmap ! ¿ Cómo escribo los puntos de interrogación y exclamación ?

• How do I type these characters in Emacs ?
• How do I type them in any general input box in Windows ?

Also, Spanish readers are welcome to fix the errors in my horrible translation above.

Answer 1

Answering our own questions is encouraged, so here we go:

In any Windows editor or text box

Source: here

Hold Alt and type a number corresponding to the char code.

To use the decimal Unicode value, prefix the number with a zero, example: Alt 0191

To use the decimal windows code page value, prefix the number with a zero, example: Alt 161

According to source, you can also type the Unicode hex value, but that needs an entry in registry and did not work for me.

• Inverted question mark (¿):

  • Alt 0191
  • Alt 168
  • Alt +00A1

• Inverted exclamation mark (­¡):

  • Alt 0161
  • Alt 173
  • Alt +00BF

In Emacs

Source: xahlee's Emacs page.

1. Inverted question mark (¿):
   • C-x 8 ?
2. Inverted exclamation mark (­¡):
   • C-x 8 !

You can also use function ucs-insert (M-x ucs-insert or C-x 8 RET) and Emacs will request a hex value to insert the character.

Or set the input method (M-x set-input-method) to ucs and type normally. To insert a Unicode char, type u.

Answer 2

According to this you can type the ¿ character by holding Alt and typing 1,6,8 on the number pad (make sure num lock is on).

This works on a standard UK keyboard on Windows XP running setup as English UK, as that's how I've written the ¿ character both times in this post, and I think should work on other setups as it's the standard entry method for unicode characters.

There might be a faster way if you have a Spanish keyboard and/or language settings, but I don't have any experience of that to be able to comment.

And, unfortunate, I cannot help with how you type the character in to emacs.

Answer 3

For an Emacs solution, use one of its input methods. For the characters used in Spanish, another possibility is iso-transl, which lets you type C-x 8 ? for ¿, C-x 8 ' a for á, etc.

For an OS solution, you could remap your keyboard to make the characters available through AltGr, dead keys or a Compose key. Windows is a bit lacking here, and in particular doesn't support Compose out of the box. I use AllChars; note that you need Emacs 24 (e.g. downloaded from the EmacsW32 site) as the current stable version doesn't recognize AllChars's “fake” keypresses.