Hello Everett,
E.J. Zufelt wrote:
Good evening,
Curious if there is an easy way to enter accented characters (French
in my case) on a Macbook keyboard with no numpad, running Snow
Leopard.
Options for entering accents on a keyboard (MacBook or otherwise),
does not depend on whether your are running Snow Leopard. When I want
to type French on my U.S. English keyboard, I'll either use Option key
combinations to type accented characters (if I only need to type a few
accented words) or, if want to type extensively in French, I'll switch
to a Canadian French keyboard so that I can touch type without
changing the way that I type most words -- i.e., the keys for accented
letter combinations are generally where punctuation signs and symbols
are located. If you want a full description of the way that the
Canadian French keyboard is laid out, and which keys differ from the
regular U.S. or Canadian English keyboard, take a look at this post
from the Mail Archive of the old forum list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40macvisionaries.com/msg32044.html
(Using the Canadian French Keyboard for French Accents)
This is a long post that documents all the differences in regular
keyboard usage for the Canadian French keyboard. If you are fluent in
French, and frequently type in that language, but do not want to
switch to a French keyboard for input, you can add the Canadian French
keyboard to your input keyboards, and either switch to it for your
typing or make it your main input keyboard.
The other way to type accented characters on an occasional basis is to
press the Option key to generate accents (and also special symbols).
If you read the previous post to my linked post in the Mail Archive
(by using the access key combination for Safari of Control-P for
previous post in thread; Control-N for the next post in the thread),
you'll find a full description of how this works for German accents.
I'll paste in a recent summary post to the mac-access list about
typing with Option key combinations:
<begin excerpt>
Accented characters on the regular Mac keyboard
For accents and more common special characters, using
the Option key in combination with the Control, Command, and Shift
keys give many of the necessary characters. If I need to type special
characters as part of names, I'll use the Option key method to
generate accents:
acute accent - Option-e
grave accent - Option-accent sign (on an Engish input keyboard, this
is the leftmost key below escape and above tab)
circumflex accent - Option-i
diaeresis - Option-u
tilde - Option-n
This group are "dead keys". You need to type the accented letter
after the Option+letter combination, so to type an "e" with an acute
accent you press the Option+e keys, release, and then type the letter
"e". If you press "Return" without typing a letter, you simply get
the accent mark.
Other accents that are closely associated with particular letters are
not dead keys; pressing the two key combination generates the special
character:
German eszett or sharp ess - Option-s
Nordic slashed o - Option-o
C with cedilla - Option-c
"oe ligature" - Option-q
Alternatively, you can switch to a language keyboard that has accented
characters.
<end excerpt>
This is getting to be a rather long post, so I'll cut down the list of
special symbols to just give you the punctuation ones you might want.
You can find a longer list of special symbol combinations typed with
option key in this archived list post:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg10170.html
(Re: Typing special characters)
<begin excerpt>
Punctuation marks: right and left quotation marks for English and other
languages; inverted punctuation marks for Spanish
‘ left single quotation mark Option+right bracket
’ right single quotation mark Option+Shift+right bracket
“ left double quotation mark Option+left bracket
” right double quotation mark Option+Shift+left bracket
« left pointing double angle quotation mark Option+backslash
» right pointing double angle quotation mark Option+Shift+backslash
‹ single left pointing angle quotation mark Option+Shift+3
› single right pointing angle quotation mark Option+Shift+4
¡ inverted exclamation mark Option+1
¿ inverted question mark Option+Shift+slash (Shift+/ is question
mark)
… ellipsis Option+semi-colon
<end excerpt>
Finally, for information on how to set up keyboard shortcuts for
switching between different input language keyboards, the most recent
archived post describing how this is done is this archived post
(another long one, but with complete information):
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg10520.html
(Re: typing accented characters.)
There is one more piece of information that may help you: you can
custom define text expansion sequences that will expand to the text of
your choice (which could help you with typing accented words) with
Snow Leopard's new text expansion features. This is described in an
article titled "Using Snow Leopard's built-in text snippets in
Mail.app":
http://www.hawkwings.net/2009/11/15/using-snow-leopards-built-in-text-snippets-in-mail-app/
This article basically describes a way to select a "Text Replacement"
sub-menu option under the "Substitutions" option under Edit in mail to
define a string to be used for some predefined key of your choosing.
You're basically using the System Preferences > Language & Text menu
features under the Text pane to set up these replacement strings, but
the steps described in the article working from the Edit menu in Mail
will take you to these options. This article has a good description
of other text replacement features under Snow Leopard, and is worth
reading. For general text expansion, in other apps navigate directly
to the System Preferences > Language & Text menu. Another option is
to buy TextExpander for the Mac, on sale for 20% off at $23.96 through
till February 28, 2010 from their MacWorld special page at: <http://smileonmymac.com/mw2010/
>
This gives extra flexibility in defining text expansion snippets that
work in every application on the Mac, and can be worthwhile if you
also use this for programming, for example. If you read the recent
post exchanges with Mike Babcock about TextExpander during yesterday
and today, you'll get more details about the sophisticated way this
can be used by programmers for coding, as well as by general users to
expand formatted dates, times, signatures, deal with common
misspellings, integrate with DropBox app usage and tweets, etc. (I'm
not a programmer or information technology person, so I don't use it
this way). Needless to say, TextExpander can also be used to define
accented phrases and names to simplify your typing.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
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