How to type special characters

❧  I've had a couple questions about how to type some of the punctuation marks I blogged about earlier.  Until now I've been copying and pasting them or looking up their html/Alt codes, which is awkward.  Shouldn't modern operating systems have an easy way to customize typing non-standard characters⸮  I looked for a better solution and found some free software, autohotkey.  You can do a lot of things with it beyond what I am mentioning here.  To work with the non-standard characters I used the unicode version from http://l.autohotkey.net/ .  Under Windows, create a text script in your Documents folder (the software asks to do this automatically the first time you run it).  Then add some key codes to the script.  I added these:

!?::Send, {U+2E2E}   ; percontation point
!1::Send, {U+203D}   ; interrobang
!<::Send, {U+00AB}   ; left guillemet
!>::Send, {U+00BB}   ; right guillemet
!a::Send, {U+2042}   ; asterism
!g::Send, {U+2767}   ; rotated hedera
!h::Send, {U+2766}   ; hedera
!j::Send, {U+2619}   ; reverse rotated hedera
!i::Send, {U+261E}   ; index
!)::Send, {U+30C4}   ; katakana sokuon
!o::Send, {U+0629}   ; ta marbuta
!p::Send, {U+067C}   ; ta with ring

Then paste a shortcut of the script into your Startup folder to automatically load when you start Windows.  The ! is the Alt key and what is after the colons :: is substituted.  This uses the Unicode designations for the symbols.  With this running if I press Alt-1 I get the interrobang, ‽, with Alt-i I get the index, ☞, Alt-) gives the ツ , etc.