How to do accented characters?

markpatterson

markpatterson

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I got used to the alt + ASCII trick on Win D'Ohs to get various values about 127, expecially french accented letters. How do you do that on an ibook?
 
System Preferences > International > KEyboard Layouts. Choose in that the 'Charachter map' (You will see a country flag in your finder menubar indicating what keyboard you are using. To use the charmap, go and click on the country flag, and choose the charmap and it will pop up.)

Also, some of the common keys can be done with

option-e
-for ´ á é í ó ú ´ Á É Í Ó Ú

option-i
-for ˆ â ê î ô û ˆ Â Ê Î Ô Û

option-u
-for ¨ ä ë ï ö ü ¨ Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü

option-n
-for ˜ ã ñ õ ˜ Ã Ñ Õ

option-`
-for ` à è ì ò ù ` À È Ì Ò Ù

These combinations - there are some that depend on your current keyboard, e.g. tilde (~) comes with my keyboard with alt-5 !!

But generally - well .. e for grave, u for umlaut.. n for ñ .. these are far easier to remember than the Windows squivalent, aren't they?

;)
 
I like that system. Much easier to memorize.
The only thing left that I'm likely to need is cedilla, a little tail-like mark that the french use to keep c soft before something other that i,e or y.
 
Well, this is a mac, isn't it? It's option c for c cedilla, and opt shift c for capital c cedilla. So, I can now address Françoise the Niçoise in her own alphabet
 
Cedilla is keyboard sensitive. I get it hitting shift-ò (i have ò as lowercase letter right of l) - so alt c gives ©, and with shift Á .. There are some keys that differ from keyboard to keyboard, but still they are always easier to remember than e.g. alt-132 ... If I have to use a pc with a keyboard that lacks letters like èòàùìéçñãõ when I need them .. I just ignore them if it's for personal communication.. Or try to substitute them with a'e'i' a" a° etc ..
 
Learn your key combos by using the bundled application called Keycaps. You'll find it in your Utilities folder. You can also cut and paste the characters from keycaps, but soon you won't need to.
 
Euro is then again one of those keyboard sensitive cases. I get € with alt-e. But not yen with alt-y (æ instead) ...
 
Giaguara, aren't the alt and option keys the same? They are on my ibook. So how do you get alt-e to be euro € and option-e e to be e acute é?
 
Can't you obtain € by typing alt-$ ?
Not only is it a nice metaphor (alter USD is Eur. currecy :D ), it also works on my azerty kboard. Maybe it'll work on qwerties too.
 
mark, rigt. well - most of those charachters i showed above are mainly on US keyboard.

so i get òàùèì with one key, and ^éç with shift-something. without alt-s. ---- but i know those otehrs because some (ñ etc.) are valid on mine -- and some I need to use (on the second keyboard).

alt = option. on mine there's written 'alt'.

These differ sure keyboard to keyboard;
¥ = alt-4
¢ = alt-shift-4
~ = alt-5
‰ =alt-shift-5
‘ = alt-3
’ =alt-shift-3
“ =alt-2
” =alt-shift-2
« = alt-1
» alt-shift-1
‹› =alt- 6 and alt-shift-6
≠ = alt-0
≈ = alt-shift-0
etc.

toast -- no it does not work. when i was in france, it took me over half an hour with a french keyboard to log in to yahoo ... :D i didn't figure why it had numbers on shift ;)
 
There's also a nice feature in OS X called Character Palette, for all the characters you can't input with your native keyboard layout. It's in the keyboard layout list in the International control panel :)
 
I'm trying to make the letter u with a straight line on top of it. (Just like the little straight line one would use over an e to signify a long e. I do find this in the Character Palette in OS X, but it when I try to insert the character into QuarkXPress, the insert button is grayed out. I *can* insert it into Text Edit, but not XPress, nor can I copy it from Text Edit into XPress.

Does anyone have any info on this?

Thanks.
 
For some (capitalist) reason, Xpress and InDesign don't support Unicode fully. With InDesign, only the characters of the region you bought the program in works, and you'd have to buy a separate version to use e.g. Arabic.

I don't know how that works with Xpress though. I'll suggest calling them.
 
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