On the Mac, special characters can be accessed directly from the keyboard by using the option key as a modifier. This feature has been present on Macs since the late-1980s, if not from the beginning, and was a means of typing characters from the extended ASCII character set as Unicode was not widely implemented on PCs prior to the mid-1990s. IBM-type PCs also had their own extended ASCII character set, but as those systems primarily had command line interface (disk) operating systems and text-based software that relied heavily on various key combinations for accessing features, the DOS/Windows method for accessing extended ASCII characters was more convoluted requiring the user to hold the Alt key while typing the ASCII code of the character they wanted specifically from the numeric keypad. (For years I thought this feature in Windows did not work because most sources failed to mention that the code must be entered from the numeric keypad.) Some examples fo these special characters and how they are typed directly on each system are shown in the table below.
| Character | Mac | Windows |
|---|
| π | option + p | Alt + 227 |
| £ | option + 3 | Alt + 156 |
| ± | shift + option + = | Alt + 241 |
| ¿ | shift + option + / | Alt + 168 |
| € | shift + option + 2 | Alt + 0128 |
Extended ASCII was never standardized so the characters above code 127 varied between the mac and DOS/Windows, but many common characters are present across both systems. Unfortunately, while Fusion does permit the user to do keyboard mapping through the Keyboard & Mouse settings panel, mapping the Windows Alt code settings does not seem to be possible because you cannot enter multiple key presses for a key mapping. It would be nice if this capability were included in Fusion, or better, the keyboard profile setting had a switch that enabled mapping the Mac extended ASCII set to the Windows extended ASCII set. As both of these character sets are fixed, turning on the feature and using a special character key combination on the Mac would send the proper Windows Alt key combination to generate that character. Some characters would not translate; for instance, (shift + option + k) does not exist in the Windows extended ASCII set. Also, the method for typing characters with diacritics on the Mac may be a challenge to implement, but not impossible.
Anyone else think this would be a good feature to add to Fusion?
