How to type A with Ring

å lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.

å has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0061 Latin Small Letter A, U+030A Combining Ring Above. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing å sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.

Its uppercase counterpart is Å (U+00C5). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.

Typing å without switching keyboard

å is the letter A carrying a ring above, and it is needed in Czech. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as A with something added.

Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + K, let go, then press a: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns no dead key: use the character map into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and å costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.

What Unicode says about A with Ring

Unicode annotates å directly. Against U+00E5 the code chart carries the note “Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Walloon”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.

How A with Ring behaves in software

å takes one column in a terminal. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.

Every way to write A with Ring

If å arrives as Ã¥

That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 A5 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00E5.