GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 154509
ALT-### character entry broken in Windows
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Try holding ALT and typing 130 on the keypad in Windows. This is a universal way in Windows to get an "é"; there are corresponding combinations for all Unicode characters (I think - or at least a lot of them), which can be seen with Character Map. This used to work in WinGTK2 apps, but it doesn't anymore - I use Gaim and GIMP. Since WinGTK installs as a binary package, I'm not sure of the version of ATK that's installed. I'm not even sure that ATK is what's at fault, but it's the best guess I know how to make here.
This certainly is not an ATK bug.
It is certainly not an "universal" way. 130 is the code for é in the OEM codepage your system happens to use (437, presumably). In another codepage, 130 would be a totally different character. See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp? url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/lang_char_code_input.asp . I quote: If the first digit you type is any number from 1 through 9, the value is recognized as a code point in the system's OEM code page. The result differs depending on the Windows system language specified in Regional and Language Options in Control Panel. For example, if your system language is English (US), the code page is 437 (MS-DOS Latin US), so pressing ALT and then typing 163 on the numeric keypad produces ú (U+00FA, Latin lowercase letter U with acute). If your system language is Greek (OEM code page 737 MS-DOS Greek), the same sequence produces the Greek lowercase letter MU (U+03BC).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 148386 ***