special characters don't copy from keyboard

[Helen@Pro]

Dear Adobe community,

I have a question regarding special characters in Adobe Pro. I have the 2020 version and when inserting text, there are a few special characters that don't copy from my keyboard, such as the pipe or the "bigger than". When looking the issue up online, I was told to go to the keystroke combination settings, only that I do not find them in my menu. Is this a version issue or does anyone know how to fix this?

Thank you very much for any pointers!

[Randy Hagan]

You don't mention whether you're working on the Mac or Windows platforms, which would help direct your answer.

• Are you able to place the same extended characters, in the same font(s), in another application like Notepad/WordPad on the PC, or TextEdit on the Mac?
• When you check the Fonts tab in the Document Properties dialog box (through the File>Properties menu command), are the fonts used in your Acrobat document subsetted?

 Those are just a few things, off the top of my head, that would make adding extended characters to an existing Acrobat document a challenge. If you've accounted for all these things, let us know and we can help with some more extraordinary situations that could come into play.

Randy

[Helen@Pro]

Hello Randy,

I am working off a HP Pavilion Notebook with a German keyboard using Windows 11. The pipe and "bigger than" button share a key with the lower and uppercase L and the "lower than" key. They do work perfectly fine in MS Word but not in the other MS Office applications or the text editor.

When I go to the Fonts tab in the File/Properties menu, it lists the fonts in that document. If I convert a document form Word to PDF, the special characters do transfer but when I want to edit the PDF in Acrobat itself, I cannot "type" them if that makes sense. It might be a keyboard issue as well, as the notebook is rather new but all the other special characters work - If I am not mistaken, there should be a special characters section in Adobe as well (like there is with smybols etc. in Word) but I cannot find it - There's the basic font settings like font type and size, bold, italics etc. but I do not see any buttons, tabs or settings for special characters.

Fun fact: The "larger than" doesn't work in this editor, either - I think the keystroke combinations might be used for other shortcuts but then that would be a Microsoft issue altogether but as I said, they do work in Word, so I am a bit lost - AM I missing something basic here?

My apologies for the confusion, I should have been more cocncrete from the getgo - I have researched the issue online and even though I am pretty sure I'm looking at all the right tabs (because they are in German and not in English), I still don't find what I am looking for.

[radzmar · Accepted solution]

You can use so calles ALT-Codes to enter characters. For > just hold the ALT key and enter 62 on the number keys on the right. 
https://alt-codes.de

[Helen@Pro]

Thank you very much, radzmar, this works!
Theoretically, I could assign the respective character an easier shortcut than the one of the alt code, correct?

[Helen@Pro]

I just found out that the [Windows + .] shortcut in Windows 11 for special characters also works within Acrobat, so problem solved, thank you!