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?"

Comments

A new topic for "Switch" commercials

[PateraSilk]

Macs have been using the option-accent system for as long as I've used them. Compared to the alt-keypad system I've used for Windows it always seemed easy and transparent. I guess no one thinks to mention this to Windows folks when they switch!

Re:Dude, it's *way* easy...

[Jeremy Erwin]

for french
option c =ç
for German
option s= ß
option \ =
for Latin
option ' = æ
option q = ?
For Spanish
option 1 =
option ? =
for corresponding with Europeans
option 3 = £
option @ =?
for lawyers
option 2 = ?
option 6 =
option 7 =
option g = ©

Re:US Keyboard is the right layout.

[eLoco]

The accented characters used for demonstration above will only display correctly if your browser display encoding is set to UTF-8. For Latin-1 encodings they look like this:

é -- e with acute accent (option+e e)
è -- e with grave accent (option+` e)
ê -- e with circumflex (option+i e)
ñ -- n with tilde (option+n n)
å -- a with ring above (option+a)
ü -- u with umlaut/diaresis (option+u u)
ç -- c with cedilla (option+c)