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Easy Character Accents in Mac OS X?
joesao writes "How have people been typing accents under OS X? I'm not talking funky key combinations, but simple, 'dead-key' stuff like: a + ` = à. In Windows this is accomplished easily by setting the input locale for keyboards as 'United States-International' but the similar function under System Preferences doesn't have any acceptable keyboards. Unicode isn't an option, either; only a few applications support that. Documentation on Apple's site is scant, and a Google search doesn't yield anything that really works. Anybody out there have a decent keyboard file for Mac OS X?"
Here is a sorta technical document about accented and special characters...
Netscape
Here is a pretty layout of what buttons to press...
Harvard
é (aka option-e e).
à (aka option-` `).
î (aka option-i i).
use key caps (in utilities) for more information (hold down option).
Note this was the same as mac OS 7-9.
To do basic combinations, try things like option-e, option-i, option-u, and then hit whatever letter you want the accent to appear over. So option-e-e would give you é.
It seems like it might be tricky, but after a while it becomes second nature.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
I did a quick Google Search and found this site that seems to answer your question.
I haveta admit though, if this answers your question, I'll be a little surprised you could't find it within Google. This was the first search term I tried.
"Derp de derp."
The add-on layout for US International can be found at http://www.brockerhoff.net/usi/.
This piece of software is absolutely necessary for typing in Portuguese (especially here in Brazil, where a common US keyboard layout is quite common, and the population is used to the US layout with dead-keys -- dating from the time of typewriters).
Please, do let Apple know that you need this keyboard layout.
I sent them my feedback about this quite a while ago (I think that I can post here the mail if I find it), but more people letting them know would promptly make them aware of its importance.
Doing all sorts of accents on Mac OS Classic/X are super easy. Maybe you just didn't know where to look... but with the plain-old US layout, you do such:
:P
/Applications/Utilities. When it is open, hold down the option key, and it will show you all the characters which are typed when you do option-key. The keys with a white square highlighted are those which are combined with other letters to create accented letters.
:)
Opt-U + Letter = An umlauted letter
(Opt-u + A = Ä)
Opt-` + Letter = A backwards accent letter
(Opt-` + e = è)
Opt-i + Letter = A caret-top letter
(Opt-i + i = î)
Opt-e + Letter = Accented letter
(Opt-e + ó)
Opt-n + Letter = An n-yayed letter
(Opt-n + n = ñ)
That's all I know off the top of my head. The only won I use regularily is the umlaut key for German, excuse the lack of knowledge on the real words for some of the kinds of accents.
But this is about the damndest easiest way to do it, less using a kb layout for a language which uses these letters.
If you ever need to find out how to do these again, open up Keycaps, in
It's a helluva lot better than ALT codes on WinDOS.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Unicode works fine in any Cocoa app,
including TextEdit, Safari, iCal, Finder,
Address Book, Mail, the new Nisus beta,
etc. The apps that have problems are
all Carbon, because they don't invoke
ATSUI properly: MS Office v.X, AppleWorks,
Internet Exploder, etc. while BBEdit (which
should know better) is spotty for some
writing systems in some cases.
Even most of these apps can handle extended Latin, though. I'm guessing the poster didn't do his homework.
...the way Mac users have always done it! option + e and then e will produce an é option + u and then e will produce an ë option + n and then n will produce an ñ etc... etc... etc... If you're a switcher there are a few websites floating around with the intent to help switches or those new to Mac OS X. www.macfora.com www.macmentor.com www.macosx.com However, searching the built in Mac OS X help engine would have found what you were looking for by searching for 'accented characters'. Really don't know why people forget about help... It's there for a reason! But if you open the Key Caps utility and start pressing buttons (ie... try pushing shift, option, command and see what happens! also you can depress option and command at the same time!)
Adobe has a good cheat-sheet of key combinations for special characters on their Type Library page. The quick link is http://www.adobe.com/type/pdfs/characcessmac.pdf
1) Fire up Key Caps, in your Utilities folder. Select the font you're using in the Font menu, and it will display all the default characters of a virtual keyboard. Try hitting the Shift key - you'll see the Shift key depress on the virtual keyboard, and the lowercase letters will change to uppercase, and numbers will change to the symbols that are universally recognized as cuss words for comic strip characters. Now try hitting the far more interesting Option (alt) key. Gaze in awe upon the alternate characters you can produce by typing Option-[character]. Also, notice the Option-[character]s with a light box around them? They're all diacritical marks - accents, umlaut, circumflex, etc. - that can be added to other letters. So, for example, if you want to put an umlaut (you know, the "Deathtöunge" dots) above an "o", you need to type Option-u, then an "o".
2) Use the Character Palette. From Apple's godawful-slow Help System:
Evan EvansonYou can use "dead keys". For example, Option-u will type a"dead-key" umlaut which will combine with the next character typed.
You can use keycaps, as someone else mentioned.
Both of these only get you the stuff available from your current key layout.
For Cocoa apps, the TextExtras extension bundle (available at http://www.lorax.com/FreeStuff/TextExtras.html) has a built-in configurable character palette. One of the pre-defined panes in that panel has all the Unicode non-spacing marks. Clicking stuff in this panel will insert the clicked mark into the currently focused text area at the insertion point. In Unicode, non-spacing marks combine with the character before them.
Not only does this panel let you type non-spacing marks unavailable from the keyboard, it also lets you compose stuff that the dead-key input rejects as non-sense (such as the all-important n-umlaut needed for the correct spelling of "Spinal Tap". Even better, you can stack multiple non-spacing marks on a single character this way.
You can activate a menuling called the 'Character Palette' that allows you to see all kinds of characters for all different kinds of fonts. Its very similar to the old PopChar control panel in MacOS 9.
Go to the 'International' preference pane.
Choose the Input Menu Tab.
At the top of the list choose the check box for the Character Palette.
As an old timer, I use the option+ keyboard shortcuts mentioned by others. However, OS X includes a nice, easily accessible Character Palette for those who don't want to type key combos.
Go to the International Preference Pane, click on input menu at the right side and check on the character palette item. Now you'll see a little menu next to the last option in the menu bar. Click it to get a bunch of key entry options. The one for accents is "accented latin."
If you really like typing accented characters, try a software called PopChar Pro. I used to use it in OS 9 and I know there is an OS X version.
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"The Mac is not a Typewriter" by Robin Williams.
This book is cicra 1990 but the basics of accenting and typing special characters on the Mac hasn't changed.
I live and work in Spain and need to use Spanish characters everyday. I bought my laptop in Britain, so the keymap is British. I just switch between keymaps with option-apple-spacebar and don't pay any attention to what the keys read when type. It works fine. Same if I have to use a US keyboard, or any keymap. In short just learn a keymap that gives the characters you need and use it!
Don't know much about the Arabic family of fonts but I use the greek and hebrew fonts for the biblical language program, Accordance. I've used many similar programs on the pc side but all of them had really, really crappy font mapping. On the mac it is really easy. The final Mem and nun (hebrew) and final sigma (grk) are added automatically at the end of words. Combination accents, (like a rough breathing mark and a circumflex over the selected vowel) only require 2 keystrokes as opposed to the 8 1/2 fingers needed to do the same thing on the PC side. Iota subscripts only require an 'option-j' after the vowel. This doesn't help much with your Arabic font problem, but maybe it'll help you to know that there are fonts for the mac and they do work well.
In Europe, where people NEED accents and have different keyboard in each country, it's still a pain in the ass to type É È À Ç Ê OE Æ oe æ with MS Windows.
MS Word under MS Windows have its own way to manage it, but it's a different way from all the others apps.
I don't know why MS keep that in that way...
( BTW: http://www.xvsxp.com )
- Type in a th
- Select the capital font
- Enable all ligatures
I first realised this when my name was suddently mangled. As for other characters, there you can always activate the character palette. If you want to do your own keyboard, here is a site that seems to explain how to do it...I did a search of OS X Arabic in Google and came up with some info.
_ ma cosx.html
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_fonts
"Mac OS X 10.2 introduced support for Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew and Thai scripts."
apple has the best language support if you ask me, so this shouldnt be a problem at all. you can always use keycaps.
I want 2D games back.
Launch System Preferences go to International and select Input Menu. Select whatever keyboard layout you want (I use Spanish and English). Whenever you need to use that keyboard layout hit option-cmd-space to go to the next keyboard layout. It's a little cumbersome but when you get used to it its very quick.
nope, alangmead was right. Opt-a will make a (yellow-highlighted) bar, which will land on top of whatever vowel you type next. Opt-b is the same for the 2nd tone.
option-e for á etc
option-i for â etc
option-u for ä etc
option-n for ã etc
option-` for à etc
option-c for ©
Why did it take 3 years to make the macs accent key shortcuts to a notice?
Can someone tell me if the windows accent keys have any logic? I hate those alt-132, alt-256 etc combo strakes..
use the option key (with a step-like icon, also mis-labelled "alt" on some keyboards)
As we're so intensly discussing the option/alt key, here's a little-known fact: the icon for that key does not symbolize a "step", but a train-track-switch.
So it's the spot where a train has the "option" (choice), to take an "alt"ernative route: to go left or right. This symbolizes what use of the option key nearly always comes down to: do the same thing in a slightly different way.
Once you know it, it's very logical, but it's one of those rare cases where Apple's visual design hasn't succeeded in being obvious to users in general.
The option key has many very powerfull other uses, for instance:
- option-command-W closes *all* windows
- option-command-M minimizes *all* windows
- option-double-click on a folder opens the folder but also closes the parent folder
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." --Groucho Marx
On a US keyboard layout, the keys are as follows:
This is pretty US-centric, because each character used is the letter which people in the US usually see most commonly with that accent (none of these are common in US English, but they are common enough in loanwords and in snippets of other languages seen sometimes). The exception to this is the acute accent, which is seldom seen in the US at all, so it was given the ` key, which looks like an acute accent anyway.
Incidentally, this is not a new feature on Mac OS X. It has worked this way since at least the System 6 days, and probably even earlier than that. Although some of the bad Carbon ports out there don't provide the same visual feedback that Cocoa and ATSUI do, the key combinations will still work. They even work in the Terminal.