In my egocentric world, the absolutely bestest thing about base sixteen (hexadecimal) is that it is the base in which my age is 21.

This post is going to be about colours and greek symbols (α, β, γ), and how we can use hexadecimal numbers to achieve these in a blog post.

Disclaimer: This is the limit of my knowledge on the subject.

Symbols

All of the characters that appear on our screen have a number assigned to them. ‘a’ to ‘z’ is 97-122 in decimal numbers, for example. The number assigned to α is 945 (and ω is 969).

When you look at α in the ‘Insert Symbol’:’(normal text)’ function of Word, you will see that has the code ‘03B1’. ‘3B1’ in hexadecimal is 945 in decimal.

(The ‘Calculator’ in your accessories can do conversions between decimal, binary and hexadecimal as if by magic – go to ‘View’:’Scientific’).

To insert α into your text type &#x and then 3B1 (without a space) followed immediately by a semicolon (;).

Notice that you drop the first zero that you saw in the ‘Insert Symbol’ thing. [NB I am pretty sure that you can only use the ‘symbols’ found in the (normal text) section. Don’t be surprise if you try ones from (symbol) and they don’t work.]

Colours

There are actually two ways that you can make text coloured.

You can place {color:blue}coloured text or ({color:red}coloured text) between percentage signs signs. You will then get: coloured text and coloured text respectively. A complete list of the colours that you can plug in is found here.

If you want to customise your colours you can use, for example, the ‘Edit Colors’ palette of ‘Paint’.

You will notice that for each colour, there are three numbers associated with ‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’. These are decimal numbers. Convert these to hexadecimal using your favouring method. The colour which I have named: ”Nice Blue” (very imaginative, yes?) was Red = 104, Green = 116, Blue = 221 which translated to Red = 68, Green = 74, Blue = DD in hexadecimal. To get my text to be this colour I write {color:#6874DD} instead of writing {color:blue}.

I think I’ll be hexadecimal now for ever and ever