What are ‘hexadecimal’ codes?
Characters are often designated by their Unicode hexadecimal value, usually in the notation ‘U+nnnn’ (or ‘U+nnnnn’, depending on the length of the number). In this notation, ‘n’ represents a digit. In decimal (‘base-10’) notation, digits range from 0 to 9 (0123456789); in hexadecimal or ‘base-16’ notation, digits range from 0 to F (0123456789ABCDEF). In ‘hex’, you count 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F and then 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1A 1B 1C 1D 1E 1F 20 21 – etc.
In hexadecimal numbers, it does not matter if you use capital letters A-F or lowercase a-f, or even a mix of capital and lowercase.
Hex codes in Unicode
Each character in the Unicode Standard is designated by one unique hexadecimal number. To mark a hexadecimal number as a ‘Unicode hexadecimal scalar value’, to give it its formal name, we prefix the hex number by ‘U+’. So the Unicode character a (‘LATIN SMALL LETTER A’) is U+0061. Unicode hexadecimal scalar values are at least four digits long, and five-digit ones are also used regularly in Brill publications: for instance, U+1D510 designates 𝔐 (‘MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL M’), a symbol often used to indicate the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible.
How do I use these hex numbers to input characters?
You may have to insert a character, and you have no idea how to do that by just typing it using the keyboard. Supposing you saw the character ă mentioned in the ‘Brill Typeface Character List’, which shows the associated hex code 0103 next to it, how do you use that code?
MS Word on MS Windows
MS Word (Windows version only, not the macOS version) has a keyboard command to convert any Unicode hexadecimal scalar value to the associated character.
| With the insertion point positioned at the end of the hexadecimal number, press Alt X | The code is converted to the character. (This works as a toggle: press Alt X again and the code reappears.) |
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This ‘Alt X trick’ in MS Word also works with hex numbers consisting of five or more digits:
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Any macOS text application
macOS provides a system-wide Unicode Hex Input mechanism, which therefore works not just in MS Word but in any application that accepts text.
This keyboard layout is pre-installed, but it is not active by default and therefore you won’t see it, so you have to ‘activate’ it (only once).
Activate Unicode Hex Input in macOS:
| Go to System Preferences… and click Keyboard to select your keyboard options |
| In the Keyboard options, under the Keyboard tab, checkmark ‘Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar’ |
| Under the Input Sources tab, |
| The dropdown menu allows you to activate a new |
| In your menu bar, near the right, you now see Note also that you now have access to two new items: |
Use Unicode Hex Input in macOS:
1) Select Unicode Hex Input in the keyboard menu in the menu bar. It can be used in any application that accepts text.
2) Once selected, you can just type Latin characters as usual. Unicode Hex Input provides basic Latin text input as you would expect. The interesting part is inputting four-digit hexadecimal Unicode scalar values.
To do this, keep the Option key depressed (sometimes called the Alt key on some hardware keyboards), and type the four hexadecimal digits of the Unicode character you wish to insert. When it appears you can let go of the Option key.
3) Unicode Hex Input is limited to inputting four-digit Unicode hex codes. But there is another way to access higher-value Unicode hex codes.
