Okay, after writing WINTER OF ICE AND IRON, I have a lot of keyboard shortcuts memorized for accent marks. Like:
Control + shift + : = an umlaut on top of the next vowel you type, for example.
I can type vowels with accent marks almost as fast as vowels without, which is seldom useful in normal life, probably, but there it is, a skill that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life.
Yesterday what I wanted was the upside-down exclamation mark for Spanish. I have that sort of thing saved in a different Word document so I can open that document and copy and paste symbols without having to scroll (in vain, too often) through the “insert special character” list. Having the upside-down punctuation marks saved in a file has been my workaround for years, and it’s . . . a moderately convenient workaround, I guess.
Well, here is a super-useful post at Kill Zone Blog that tells me the keyboard shortcut for the upside-down exclamation point is:
ALT + 1 = ¡
I wish I’d known that yesterday! I have never taught myself the Alt shortcuts. There are heaps of them, apparently. The upside-down question mark is harder, and in fact the linked post does not appear to offer that one, so I googled it and it is this:
Alt + Ctrl + Shift + ? = ¿
I will never be able to do that on the fly, without looking at the keyboard. But on the other hand, it’s slightly more convenient than opening a different Word file to copy and paste the symbol.
The linked post offers lots more — too many, really — but those two above are the ones I need to remember.
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Another option is CopyChar. It’s conveniently broken into categories, and you can also search for descriptions. You just click a character and it’s copied to your clipboard. You probably don’t need this, but your other blog followers might find it useful.