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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.
This should take care of your needs.
Italian:
Just add "a" to the end of all words. (e.g. "This-a is-a how-a it-a looks-a!")
English:
Remove all 'h's.
Scottish:
Remove all coherence.
Australian:
Apparently, Australia is an advanced civilization where they have efficiently replaced every noun with the word "Foster's."
American:
Pepper your writing liberally with the word "like".
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
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 Evanson