Concepts

How are fonts related to the keyboard?

A computer font relates specific character shapes to specific keys on the keyboard. Most of these are straightforward; if you press the key marked z you will produce the lower-case letter z in the current font. Holding down the Shift key while you press z produces an upper-case Z.

Most fonts also contain characters that have no corresponding key on the keyboard. For example, here is a chart of all characters producible in the Times New Roman font.

These additional characters can be used in your documents, but to do so you must:

1. Copy them from the system Character Map (available from Start/Program/Accessories/Character Map) and then paste them in your document, or
2. Use the Insert/Symbol... menu command

Feel free to experiment with nonstandard characters, but we will not be covering them in this course.

Some keys or codes may not be assigned any character at all. If you use an unassigned character code in your text, it will appear in your document as a plain empty rectangle:

Copyright 1996 by the Curators of the University of Missouri