Creating Compound Characters

Subscriber Felipe Jimenez asked if there is a way to place the ^ sign on top of different letters. Felipe writes about mathematics, and such compound characters are very necessary for the type of writing he does.

Some compound characters are already available within Word. These depend on the typefaces you use in your document; you can easily insert special compound characters by using the Symbol option from the Insert menu. Select the character you want, and then click on Insert.

If there is not a ready-made compound character, you can use Word's special fields to synthesize your own. For instance, if you want to place the ^ symbol over the top of the N, then you can follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point where you want the compound character to appear.
2. Press Ctrl+F9 to insert field braces.
3. Type EQ \o(N,).
4. Position the insertion point between the comma and the closing parenthesis.
5. Hold down the Alt key as you use the numeric keypad to type 0136. This inserts the ^ character that is most appropriate to creating the compound character.
6. Delete any extra spaces appearing in the field.
7. Press Shift+F9 to show the results of the field code.

If you want to change the characters that make up the compound character, change the N in step 3 and use a different character in step 5.