Try creating a text file in your text editor, saving it, and then importing it into InDesign and Illustrator. This should work in any version of InDesign; you may need Illustrator CS, as this is the only version of Illustrator that supports Unicode.

Note that you can also use the InDesign glyph palette, accessible from the Type menu.

By the way, if you have Romanian text, the typographically correct form for the 'cedilla' is actually a kind of small, unattached comma-like mark under the S and T. This may be encoded •••• or T with cedilla because this is the codepoint used in the old Romanian 8-bit codepages. In Unicode, the Romanian diacritics were disunified from the cedilla forms, and given their own codepoints. You will, of course, be limited by what your font supports.

Weird, for some reason Typophile automatically censored 'as' followed by 'S', even though there was a space between them. Not only can't the software spell arse correcly, it can't spell ••• right either.

I could be wrong, John, but there might be a simpler solution to Marc's dilemma.

Depending on which characters you need, you may be able to type them directly from the keyboard. The tricky part is knowing which keys or key combinations to type.

Before Panther, you could just check the Key Caps utility. In Panther, Apple kind of hid hid it. here is a page that tells how to get it out of hiding. It's called the Keyboard Viewer now. Once you have it open on your screen, you can find the characters you want easily by trying different shift and option combinations.

Alternatively, there are charts showing the standard key combinations, such as this one.

It may also be that the font you have does not have the exact accented characters you need. In that case, if you look in the Keyboard Viewer, you will see that there are also accents by themselves. These can be combined with any character using kerning to position them.

I don't know if you use InDesign, Mark, but John's suggestion to use the Glyph palette (under Type : Insert Glyphs) is the way to go. It shows all of the characters in a given font; double clicking on any character in the palette adds it at your insertion point.

Thanks for the responses.

Have opened the keyboard viewer - the characters I need are not shown there.

HOWEVER... I went back after re-reading Marc's post... Insert Glyphs is the kiddie!

Just need a way to crack that in AI and I'm cool (I assume that I can do that in AI CS?).

Many thanks.

I knew someone here would crack this. Consider me happy ;-)

I'll be back here to educate and enjoy when I kill this deadline!

Thanks. One and all... *retires busy but happy

John gets all the credit here. I was just directing your attention to his post. As for getting those elusive characters into AI, could you insert them into InD using the glyph palette, then use a simple cut and paste to move them to AI?

...could you insert them into InD using the glyph palette, then use a simple cut and paste to move them to AI?

The tricky part of this equation is that only the new Illustrator CS supports Unicode text encoding, so you are likely to run into problems pasting Unicode characters into earlier versions.