Entering special characters

There are two types of entry of information used on the Proposals On-Line web portal:

1. Text boxes to be filled in by the applicant (e.g., project title and summary sections). The text boxes now accept a much larger range of symbols, and the portal is much more accepting of text that is copied and pasted from a Word document. For example, text with macrons, such as the word, "Māori", may be copied and pasted from a Word document, and the macron will be retained. And some Greek symbols can be copied and pasted too. In some cases, though, the use of character codes (as described below) will be required, but some characters (e.g. certain Greek symbols) will not be able to be entered, whatever approach you take.
2. Documents that can be uploaded by the applicant (e.g., Sections 2 and 5, for which the templates are available from Proposals On-Line).

For text boxes there is an extended character set which will enable you to “type” characters not otherwise seen on your keyboard such as a dieresis or umlaut above o (ö); an acute above e (é); and the plus-minus sign (±). This should allow you to fill in some character codes in the text boxes of the web portal. For uploaded documents there should be the full character set available to you on your word processing program. Under the Windows environment the character set can be displayed using the application Character Map (charmap.exe) for a particular font like Times New Roman. Then you can see what extended character you would like and: (i) copy/paste; or (ii) use a combination of keystrokes to obtain the character in the bottom right hand corner of the application.

1. “Select” and then “Copy” the character and paste to the online text box.
2. Alternatively, use a combination of keystrokes to obtain the character in the bottom right hand corner of the application. For example, to get the small letter ‘e’ with acute is keystroke Alt+0233 (é). This means to press and hold the alt key while typing 0233 on the numerical keypad (numpad). Laptop keyboards often do not have a numpad, but may provide numpad input by holding a modifier key (typically labelled "Fn") and operating keys on the standard keyboard.

We hope to extend the support to Macintosh OS X and unix-based systems on how to access the extended character set in the near future. Suggestions and improvements to this information are welcomed.

Commonly Used Character Codes