Esther you just got in ahead of me, though I must confess your mail was infinitely clearer than mine would have been. Thanks very much for the spotlight tip I'd missed that one. While using control-space isn't inconvenient, I agree wholeheartedly with you regarding an unwillingness to change default key assignments.
Cheers Donal On 25 Sep 2009, at 20:09, Esther wrote: > > Hi Dónal, > > Well, in your case the easiest way to type "o acute" would probably be > to switch to an Irish keyboard and press Option+O, which would save > you one extra keystroke. You can select this under the > "International" menu of "System Preferences" by going to the "Input > Menu" tab, interacting with the table, and then checking the box to > turn on the keyboard for either "Irish" or "Irish Extended". > (Probably "Irish" is preferred, since it will give you the characters > you want without having to use Unicode encoding extensions.) The > input language keyboards are listed alphabetically after a few > character-based language options (for Chinese, Korean, etc.). If you > don't currently use the option key to type any special characters, you > can just keep the Irish keyboard as your default keyboard. It will > only affect which option key combinations you will need to press for > other special characters that are probably infrequently used. > > With the Irish keyboard selected you would be able to type acute > accents over all vowels just by pressing the option key at the same > time: á é í ó ú And you could type o+e and a+e ligatures by > pressing option+q and option+apostrophe: "œ" and "æ". > > > The easiest way to figure out different input keyboards is to use > TextEdit and start typing combinations with variations of pressing the > option, command, control and shift keys. > > Getting back to input language keyboard selection, you can check as > many languages as you wish to use in the table on the Input Menu tab, > then stop interacting and check the box for "Show input menu in menu > bar" so that your current text input language keyboard appears on the > status menu bar. You'll also notice that just after the table of > keyboard layouts there are Input menu shortcuts for quick switching > between your different keyboards. There is a conflict between the > default input switching shortcuts and the Spotlight shortcut -- Apple > assigned the same shortcut to Spotlight as it had been using for many > years for input switching. I've changed my shortcut for "Select > previous input source:" to be "⌥⇧Space" and "Select next input > source in menu: " to be "⌥Space". You can press (VO-Space) the > button for Keyboard Shortcuts to be taken to the "Keyboard Shortcuts" > tab of the "Keyboard & Mouse" menu (in Leopard) to reassign the > shortcuts. I'm not upgraded yet to Snow Leopard, so I won't try to > give exact directions, but in Leopard you'd interact with the table of > shortcuts, navigate to the end with VO-End (on a laptop this would be > VO-Fn-Shift-Right Arrow), and then VO-Left arrow back to the > Description column and VO-Up arrow to find the entries for "Input > Menu" and "Spotlight". I'd expand each entry (VO-backslash on an > English input keyboard; or VO-H twice to bring up the Commands menu > and select "Toggle Disclosure Triangle" will work if you don't have an > English input keyboard). Then I'd uncheck the boxes for the Spotlight > commands in conflict (temporarily) and check the boxes for the input > menu shortcuts I'd want to assign. There used to be an incredibly > annoying focus bug, where you couldn't reassign the shortcut by > following the instructions to double-click in the column for the the > new shortcut (with VO-Shift-Space) and then type in the new sequence > -- just for these keys because of the conflicting definitions. It > turned out that if you simply tabbed to the column for the new > shortcut and typed in the new shortcut assignment, things would work. > Alternatively, if you wanted to avoid these frustrations, you could > check the boxes for both Spotlight and Input Menu shortcuts (with > exactly the same definitions), and then stop interacting with the > table and go to the "Restore Defaults" button and press it (VO-Space). > > Persevering with the shortcut change would leave me with these > definitions: > > Input Menu: > Select the previous input source > Option-Shift-Space > Select the next input source in the input menu Option-Space > > Spotlight: > Show Spotlight search field Command-Space > Show Spotlight window > Command-Shift-Space > > Taking the easy route of pressing the "Restore Defaults" button would > give me: > > Input Menu: > Select the previous input source > Command-Space > Select the next input source in the input menu Option-Command- > Space > > Spotlight: > Show Spotlight search field Control-Space > Show Spotlight window > Control-Option-Space > > I don't like changing standard defaults for things like Spotlight, so > I prefer the first route. > > You'll probably need to restart your machine to have the shortcuts > take effect, since they'll across all applications. If you don't > change language keyboards, or do so only rarely, there's no need to > define a shortcut. You can just use VO-M twice or Control-F8 to move > to the status menu bar and navigate to the "Text Input" menu, arrow > down, and set your input language keyboard. However, if you're > composing in another language, it's convenient to just use Option- > Space to switch into the keyboard for the next language in the list. > > I confess that I never type frequently enough on an AZERTY (French) > keyboard to get used to having my "A" and "Q" keys and "W" and "Z" > keys switched, so I will switch to a Canadian French keyboard instead, > that gives me the accented characters, but leaves the letters in the > order that I'm used to. > > HTH. Incidentally (off this topic), how did your Open VPN solution > work out? Did Viscosity work accessibly for you? There was an > interesting blog post from Rogue Amoeba about the accessibility issues > in the status menu bar icons: > > http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/08/27/soundsource-2-5-and-a-story-about-the-menubar/ > > It turns out that those applications like Tunnelblick and Viscosity > which have status bar menu icons that VoiceOver can't access use > Apple's recommended (for third party software) “NSStatusItem” > method of implementing the icon, while apps that do provide icons that > VoiceOver can see implement the menu bar icon using the > “menuExtra” > method that Apple uses for its own software. Software developers that > use the "menuExtra" method rely on a "haxie" called "Menu Extra > Enabler" from Unsanity, which has to get fixed up each time there is > an operating system upgrade. My archived post about this is at: > > http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg09249.html > (Accessible Status Menu Bar Icons and VoiceOver) > > in case you want to read more about this. > > Cheers, > > Esther > > > Donal Fitzpatrick wrote: > >> >> Hi there, >> >> Just wondering if there is an easier way to type accented characters >> than the method I'm presently using. Let's assume I want to insert >> the letter "o acute" into a document. The way I'm presently doing >> this is to press "option-e" followed by "o". Is there a way to do >> this in one keystroke? >> >> Thanks >> >> Dónal >>> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
