I use ALT codes on most websites and in Word to get accented vowels (essential when writing Irish). All of a sudden, my ALT codes are acting screwy. This exact same thing happened a year or so ago, and I have no idea what caused it then, what caused it to get better, or why it’s happening again. I could sure use some advice. Here’s what’s happening:
In Firefox (my usual browser):
ALT + 0225 works fine (gives me á)
ALT + 0224, however (which should give me an a with a grave accent) causes me to go back to the preceding page.
ALT+ 0233 works fine (gives me é)
ALT + 0237, however, which should give me í, takes me to the Firefox start page
ALT + 0243, which should give me ó, causes me to go back to the preceding page
ALT + 0250 works fine (gives me ú)
ALT + 0193 works fine (gives me Á)
ALT + 0201 works fine (gives me É)
ALT + 0205 works fine (gives me Í)
ALT + 0211 works fine (gives me Ó)
ALT + 0218 works fine (gives me Ú)
In Word:
None of the ALT codes work. Nothing happens at all.
In Email (Outlook Express): All of the ALT codes work fine. No problem at all.
Internet Explorer works exactly the same as Firefox
This is terribly frustrating, because I have a newsletter to get out (using Word), and I need fadas…not to mention that, at any site but this IGTF (which has buttons for accented vowels), I can’t get í or ó
Any suggestions at all would be helpful. I’ve tried clearing my cookies and rebooting…that hasn’t changed a thing.
an obvious thing to check:
is numlock on? Have you tried pressing the numbers on both the numeric keypad and the regular numbers at the top of the keyboard?
If numlock is off, alt-home (the “7” in 237) takes you to the start page. alt left-arrow (the 4 in 244) takes you back to the preceding page.
In Firefox, the likely reason some worked and some didn’t is technical. Firefox “hooks” the keyboard to capture alt-codes, to see if you hit alt home, alt left-arrow, etc. If no key combinations of interest to Firefox are captured, they get passed to the Windows OS which handles them as you would expect: rendering the character.
The psuedo code can probably be expressed like this:
hook keyboard
Is entry something we care about? (alt-home, etc)
if so, perform action and clear keyboard buffer.
If not, do not clear keyboard buffer (and thus the OS gets it).
Probably none of them worked in Word because it likely hooks all keyboard input, and if it can’t figure out what you want (alt INS+DownArrow+PgDown+Home) it ignores it and doesn’t pass it to the OS for interpretation. It’s likely that Word has it’s own alt-code interpreter. a duplication of effort.
Word probably looks like this:
Hook keyboard
Try to figure out what to do
If can’t figure out what to do, do nothing.
Clear buffer (and thus the OS never gets it).
That’s my guess as a programmer, anyway, and probably more than anyone really cared.
As a language geek who is married to a computer geek, I thoroughly understand and respect geekdom! And the explanation helped…hopefully I’ll remember it the next time this thing happens.
Although that was an awefully in-depth explanation 
