Windows 10 Missing Left Double Quotation Mark Glyph in Character Map

Question

This is so weird.

I am simply trying to type an open double quotes symbol in Windows 10 that should look like this:

Actually, I'm trying to replace wrongly interpolated quotes symbols in an ANSI encoded text document, but I'll address that in a separate post. First thing's first.

Several sources on the internet offer matter-of-fact ways to type in UNICODE characters using only a Windows keyboard. I'm in the US so I'm using "US-QWERTY" keyboard layout.

WHAT I TRIED SO FAR

You would have thought this would just be simple, but it isn't. Here is what I have tried already:

1) This WebNots post says that "ALT 8220" should give me the required unicode character:

But, it does not. When I hold down the right ALT key and type "8220" into the numeric keypad and then release the ALT key, this is the character I get this instead:

This is a lower left right angle bracket glyph ---> Nothing near a LEFT DOUBLE QUOTE!

2) Do other ALT characters display correctly? YES. For instance, the neutral double quote (ALT + 0034, pictured below) displays just fine:

3) So it doesn't seem to be an issue with incorrect character mapping. But, just in case I looked into that possibility. Following this post I checked to see if the document incorrectly coded. It turned out to be correctly (as far as I can tell) encoded as ANSI, because when I changed the encoding to UTF-8 there were all kinds of "x" codes displayed instead of characters.

How to replace Unicode Character in Notepad++

4) Here is a quick table showing the unicode characters for various quotation mark types:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

MY QUESTION

Why is Windows 10 not letting me type any directional quotes/left double quotes/open double quotes

NOTE: This is NOT the issue with having to press twice that some are having.

RESOURCES

To avoid cluttering this post too much here are some other links that I also referenced that seemed relevant, but did not result in a solution.

• http://www.amp-what.com/unicode/search/quote https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/201c/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/tip/microsoft/enter_unicode.htm https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/wgl4e https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-specification Windows 10 changed how quotation marks work. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Try Alt+0147 or open character map and search for "Left double quote mark" then you will see that as Keystroke it is associated with Keystroke Alt+0147.

Answer 2

The Alt codes on the page you showed look like the Microsoft Word Alt codes, which predate Unicode. If you want to type Unicode symbols, hold down the Alt key, press +, then the Unicode hex code, then release the Alt key. E.g. for Left Double Quotation Mark; Alt +201C.