I say sometimes used because there are some strange ones available that will most likely never be used, but just in case, we’re going to cover them as well. Some of the more popular symbols are the copyright and trademark (and registered trademark), not used very often, but every book should have the copyright symbol on the copyright page, so it may be important to know how to put it there.
As with many things in Windows, there are a few different ways to do it. If you have AutoCorrect turned on (which you probably do unless you intentionally turned it off), you can type “(c)”, and it will ‘correct’ it to the copyright symbol. On the other hand, if you prefer to do things by yourself, you can always type Ctrl-Alt-C.
Similarly, you can get the trademark and registered trademark symbols with “(tm)” and “(r)” respectively…or Ctrl-Alt-T and Ctrl-Alt-R. Either way works fine. (For those of you who prefer mousing around, those symbols, and many others, can be found on the Insert Tab, Symbols Group, Symbol pulldown.)
Accents
A few other ‘symbols’ sometimes used are actually just accented letters, such as the ‘e’ in “café”. Again, there are a few ways to get those into your ms. I find the easiest way is to combine the accent with the regular letter by first typing the accent with Ctrl, then the letter. For example, to type “café” I would type “caf”, then hold Ctrl and type what looks like the appropriate accent mark, in this case the apostrophe, then release Ctrl and hit the letter ‘e’.
When you type the Ctrl-apostrophe, nothing appears, but when you hit the ‘e’, you get both! All you have to do is keep track of which accent mark you want. We wanted the acute accent (the one pointing up to the right) this time. If we had wanted the grave accent (pointing down…to a grave), we’d use the backtick mark (found under the tilde ‘~’ in the upper left of most keyboards).
The circumflex is found above the ‘6’, so you’d type Ctrl-Shift-6 to get that one. Putting the tilde above ‘n’ is done the same way: Ctrl-Shift-tilde (it’s above the backtick we used for the grave accent, but with Shift, we get the tilde). Also there is the cedilla…the little dangly thing hanging down below the letter ‘c’ in some words: façade for example. It sorta looks like a comma, so that’s what you’d use, typing Ctrl-comma then ‘c’. Finally, to get an umlaut (two horizontal dots over the letter), you’d use the symbol that looks like two vertical dots: the colon! Ctrl-Shift-colon followed by ‘o’ gives ‘ö’, just what you’d need if your character were a German scientist (or whatever).
As you experiment, you’ll find other key combinations that make various accented letters. Have fun and play around. You may decide that you need an international cast of characters, so you can use all those neat letters.