The trick here is to forget math and think phonetics. The good news is that they can be created in Unicode, but it's quirky. Although these are common symbols, they haven't made it as a single character into Unicode (much like there thermodynamic dot symbols are half missing unless they are also in Old Irish or another foreign language's spelling system. Since it’s not cloud-based or fancy in demos, such merely useful changes are unlikely to get much love at Redmond.A common question I get (at least common in Unicode terms) is what the code is for the p-hat (p̂) symbol and x-bar (x̄) symbols in statistics. While Microsoft’s doing that, the same team could deploy the very useful Alt + X trick more widely across both Office for Windows and Mac.ĭon’t hold your breath. If that’s done, then the Ctrl + Shift + Q shortcut can be added to Word for Mac and also Excel and PowerPoint for both platforms. Leave Symbol in Windows for compatibility. That means dropping the Windows only Symbol font, in favor of a cross-platform font like Segoe UI Symbol. Retain the current mapping to Greek or math symbols but replace what’s typed with a Unicode character value as well as a font change. The replaced characters should have Unicode values so they are compatible with a much wider range of symbol fonts. The whole system should be Unicode compliant.

It’s long overdue for an upgrade from Microsoft and not just so it works with modern collaborative documents. This part of Word doesn’t appear to have been looked at for a long, long time perhaps more than a decade. Or make sure Font Embedding is on for that document so the Symbol font travels with the document. For example, make a Pi sign using the Ctrl + Shift + Q trick, then change to Segoe UI Symbol and the letter P will appear.īe careful using Ctrl + Shift + Q on collaborating documents because you can’t be sure what fonts will be used on other computers. That means if you change the font on a character using Symbol font, you’ll get a very different character or nothing at all. Like some other old fonts (Wingdings and Webdings), Symbol doesn’t follow the Unicode character numbering.

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