Click on the character you want, and PopChar inserts it at you current cursor position in whatever document you've been working on, and disappears again. Then, when you want to insert a special character into your word processing document, e-mail, or XML document in your favorite XML editor, all you have to do is hit the hot-key and PopChar pops up with a list of characters that you can insert. From then on PopChar lives happily among the task bar icons in the lower right corner of your screen. I say rediscover, because I used to use PopChar all the time some 15+ years ago on the Mac, but they now have a Windows version 3.2 as well, and it is just so much more powerful and useful than CharMap.Īfter installing PopChar for the first time, you get to adjust some preferences, such as whether you want PopChar to auto-start every time you login, or what hot-key you want to associate with PopChar (I use Ctrl-~ on my laptop). I was, therefore, very happy to rediscover an old " friend" this week: PopChar is a character map replacement utility and much more. Unfortunately the Windows CharMap utility isn't really that helpful at all when you want to type those characters, because you have to find it (typically it's hidden away under Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools) and then you have to copy/paste every character into your word processor or e-mail program one at a time. This is, of course, next to impossible when you have non-German keyboard, because none of these characters are available on the standard US keyboard layout. There are many reasons why one would need to use the Windows CharMap utility from time to time - be it to insert special mathematical characters, Greek letters, to properly write Daisuke Matsuzaka-san's name in Kanji (松坂 大輔), or enter any other Unicode characters into your XML documents - but one use was mostly on my mind this week in Austria: the need to write German Umlaut characters (ä, ö, ü) and the German sharp-s character (ß) when you want to write proper German text.
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