I recently read the following headline and cringed:
“Domain name for only 99c?”
Doesn’t anyone know how to produce the cent symbol any more?
My age is showing, I know. I remember typewriters, where Shift+6 produced the cent symbol (¢). Now it produces the caret symbol (^), for no particular reason. Because of that, most people resort to using the dollar symbol ($), as in $.99. That’s fine, but wouldn’t 99¢ read more naturally?
So here are some tips on how to produce special characters like the cent symbol.
To produce the cent symbol on your keyboard, simply hold down the Alt key, then press 155 on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key. This sequence of key presses is usually represented as Alt+155. Try it.
For those who are using laptop computers, the numeric keypad is often incorporated into the regular keypad, and you have to press the Fn (function) key to activate the numeric keypad. Translation (and this is how I produce the cent symbol on my laptop): Simultaneously press the Alt and Fn keys, then press jii (which corresponds to 155 on the numeric keypad), then release the Alt and Fn keys.
Is anyone looking for employment? If so, you’ll be sending out your résumé. How did I produce the e-with-acute-accent character? That would be Alt+130.
I’ve put together a resource page that you might want to bookmark:
http://carleric.com/resources/charmap.html
When you’re coding in raw HTML, the cent symbol is written as ¢—note that the final semicolon is a part of the HTML code. And where did that em dash (—) come from? That would be —. My charmap.html page shows lots of HTML (and ASCII and Unicode) options.
Finally, for those who are curious, 張駿 (Zhāng Jùn) is my name in Chinese. 
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I know, I know, the Chinese characters appear as question marks. I’m working on a solution. It has something to do with the encoding setting in the underlying MySQL database. The good news is that my readers will benefit from my research. I’ll post a solution as soon as I find one. Meanwhile, continue to use those special characters that do render correctly.
I finally got the Chinese characters (張駿) to render correctly. I’ll be adding a post explaining what I did—and why it took so long.
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