Special Characters
Adding Special Characters to NaturallySpeaking
Prior to Release 4, in medicine, the degree symbol "°" invariably needed to be added using the Vocabulary Editor. In legal work, the section sign "§" usually needed to be added.
This is done using the Windows Character Map and the Vocabulary Editor.
- First open the Windows Character Map (Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character Map on Windows98) and find the desired symbol. Select it with the mouse, then press the "Select" button, then press the "Copy" button.
- Then go to NaturallySpeaking, open the Vocabulary Editor, position the cursor in the " Written Form" box, and enter a Ctrl-v to "paste" the symbol into the Vocabulary Editor.
- Then use the tab character or mouse to move to the "Spoken Form" box and enter "degrees," "degree sign," "section sign," or whatever you wish to say to cause the character to appear.
You may also wish to use the VocEdit tool to change the spacing attributes of such special characters.
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VocEdit to Change Characteristics of Symbols, Words, and Phrases
For special formatting, VocEdit solves MANY problems if you always need to format particular words, punctuation marks, or phrases identically. You can control spacing before/after words/phrases, capitalization, and other attributes. To learn more about VocEdit, and to download it, see Joel Gould's web site.
Modified August 2000
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What is a "numeric colon" or "numeric hyphen" or "numeric comma?"
Included with NaturallySpeaking (prior to Release 7) are character names for most keyboard symbols. A couple may not be recognizable:
- "numeric colon" is the colon symbol, but without a trailing space. This is useful for time-of-day (e.g. 10 numeric colon 35 --> 10:35) and ratios (5 numeric colon 2 --> 5:2)
- "numeric hyphen" is the "-" without leading or trailing spaces as in telephone numbers.
- "numeric comma" is the "," without leading or trailing spaces as in large numbers such as 1,432,768.
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