How do I use a Greek letter in a label in Windows IDE?

General
1

I have a label that needs to indicate the value entered in the corresponding text field should be microseconds, abbreviated as “µs” – on a mac this is no big deal - option-m does the trick.

I can’t find an equivalent keystroke in Windows though - when googling the only results tell you to type Alt-230, but the Xojo IDE won’t allow this, it just beeps at me.

Normally I would just open the project in mac and make the edit there, but it’s on a windows machine that’s not on the network right now so it’s not that simple. There must be a way to do this directly in Windows, right?

2

You might be able to use the Windows on-screen keyboard.

3

I looked at that and there are no special characters when I press alt, ctrl, etc.

4

I found it. But my god Windows is just an abomination of an operating system. I had to go to the Character Map application, then scroll through a tiny grid of letters until I spotted lowercase mu. Then select it to load it into a text field, then copy, then I could paste it into my app.

That’s 5 steps to do the same thing as option-m in the mac. yeesh.

5

Have you tried CTRL + ALT 230?

CTRL + ALT seems to be the equivalent of the old ALTGR key.

6

I just did but it does nothing. Doesn’t beep at me, but also doesn’t work

7

Here are some solutions which worked in WordPad (not sure about Xojo).
1.On-Screen Keyboard
a) Enable the number pad.
b) Hold down the ALT key on your real keyboard (you may also have to hold down to fn key as well as ALT).
c) Click the keys on the virtual keyboard number pad (it was 0181 for me).
d) Release the real keyboard key(s).

2.Unicode Sequence
You can type the Unicode sequence 00b5 and then press ALT-X

3.Character Map
When you click on the glyph in the Character Map grid and its preview appears you can then drag and drop it.

8

thanks. Still way clunkier than on the mac but that helps. I’ll give it a try later

9

Here I just hold the left Alt key and type 230 on the numeric keypad, release the Alt and get a “µ” all the time.

10

Maybe I should clarify - I’m doing this in the label’s text field in the inspector. I’m also in 2023R4, if that matters. Beeps every time I try to type it in using Alt-230 on Windows, but it works on Mac.

11

2024r4.2 here, I can set it

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12

Ahh. I see. the key here is the number pad. The keyboard on that machine is small and doesn’t have one. I swapped it out temporarily for one that does and it works.

If you do it using the numbers across the top of the keyboard it just beeps at you. if you do it with the numpad, it does nothing until you lift your finger off the Alt key, then µ appears. Not exactly intuitive, but it works.

Thanks

1 Like
13

Yes

:+1:t2: