Romanized Arabic in English Texts — Part 5: Inserting Symbols and Creating Shortcuts

 Ælfwine Mischler

As an editor and indexer, I often deal with texts that use diacritics to transcribe Arabic. In parts 1 through 4 of this series (Romanized Arabic in English Texts, Part 1 — Sources of Variations; Romanized Arabic in English Texts, Part 2 — Other Challenges for Editors; Romanized Arabic in English Texts, Part  3 — Spelling the Definite Article;  Romanized Arabic in English Texts, Part 4 — Omitting, Capitalizing, and Alphabetizing the Definite Article), I often mention the use of special characters, but until now, I have not explained how to put them in your Word document. In this part, I discuss how to insert symbols and create keyboard shortcuts. In part 6, I discuss how to use AutoCorrect and FRedit for special characters.

Insert Symbol

If you only need to insert a few special characters in a Word document, you can use this method.

1. Go to the Insert tab and click on Symbol. You will bring up a box with up to 20 of the most recently inserted symbols.
2. If what you want is not there, click on More Symbols at the bottom.
3. Another window will pop up. (You can click and drag on the little triangle at the bottom to enlarge it if you want.) Choose the font and subset that you want.

4. Find and click on the character you want in the table.
5. Click on Insert, then Close. The next time you open the Symbols menu, that character will appear in the box that opens first, so you don’t have to search for it again.

Note that not all characters are available in all fonts, but the most common ones should be available in popular fonts. Your publisher might require you to use a particular font or even provide one for you to download and use. For Arabic, in Times New Roman, I find the letters with macrons under Latin Extended A; the letters with dots are under Latin Extended Additional.

Under the table of letters, on the right, you will see the character code (circled in red in the screen shot). I have selected the Unicode (hex) code from the drop-down list to the right of that, since most publishers require Unicode characters. If your publisher has provided you with a list of Unicode characters to use, check that the code for the character you have selected from the table matches the one from your publisher, since some characters look similar but are different.

The method above is fine if you only have to use it a few times, but if you have to do this many times, you will want another method. You can create keyboard shortcuts (discussed below) if you only have a few different characters to insert, but if you have to use many different characters in a text (as I do with Arabic), use AutoCorrect or the FRedit macro (discussed in part 6).

Create Keyboard Shortcuts

1. Go to the Insert tab and the Symbols menu.
2. Find and select the character you want, but instead of clicking on Insert, click on Shortcut Key at the bottom left. A new window pops up.

3. Type in the shortcut you want — usually Alt + something or Alt + Shift + something. Word will warn you if the key combination is already assigned to something else, in which case you can override (not a good idea if it’s a function) or choose another key combination.
4. Click on Assign.

Note that the lowercase and uppercase versions of the same character have different character codes, so if you need both versions, you will have to repeat these steps and use a different key combination for each.

I have created shortcuts for characters that I use frequently: Alt + A for Æ [00C6] (the first letter in my name) and Alt + V for P (a check mark in Wingdings 2).

As I said, this method is OK if you need only a few special characters, but if you need many, such as I do for transcribing Arabic, you will run out of possible key combinations. Instead, use AutoCorrect or the FRedit macro, which I discuss in part 6.

Ælfwine Mischler is an American copyeditor and indexer in Cairo, Egypt, who has been the head copyeditor at a large Islamic website and a senior editor for an EFL textbook publisher. She often edits and indexes books on Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and Egyptology.

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