Hi Kevin, I'll cc this to the macvisionaries list, since this is a long answer that may be of interest to others who don't subscribe to the viphone list due to the high traffic volume. To briefly summarize, you asked about using the keyboard to select and copy portions of text, and you also asked about how to type accented French characters into a text document on your iPhone using an Apple Wireless Keyboard for your French class writing assignments.
In text documents you can use the Apple Wireless (or other Bluetooth) keyboard to move by character, word, line, etc. and if you hold down the Shift key in combination with these movement key shortcuts you will select the character(s), word(s), or line(s) at the same time. Then you can copy your selection with Command+C and paste the selection with Command+V. So, for example I could move down to the middle of a text document by pressing my down arrow until I reached the section I wanted, and then I could move forward word by word by holding down the Option/Alt key and tapping the right arrow key (or backwards by tapping the left arrow key if I went too far). Now, if I wanted to select a portion of this text, I could hold down the Shift key and then press Option+Right arrow to select the next word. If I want to select more words, characters, or lines, I continue to hold down my Shift key and tap the movement key shortcuts. So, for example, if I wanted to select three words from my starting point, I would hold down the Shift and Option keys and tap the Right arrow key three times. If I wanted to extend this by adding a few characters to the end of my selection, I would continue to hold down the Shift key, but then tap my right arrow key -- possibly moving back by tapping my left arrow key to remove selected text if I went too far Then when I'm done with selecting text, I'll release the Shift key, and press Command+C to copy. If I want to paste the text into the Notes app or my Simplenote app, I'll press VO-H twice (e.g. hold down Control+Option and tap the "H" key twice) to move to the App Switcher and then navigate to my selected app with VO+Right arrow or Left arrow, and VO+Space to switch to that app. Then I'll paste with Command+V. For more details, see the archived post, "Selecting and Navigating in Note texts on iDevices with the Apple Keyboards and Simplenote App": http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg27394.html The main issue and, I suspect, the reason that no one answered your initial question, is that you asked about copying text from content displayed within another app -- not a text file and not editable content. I don't think you can do that with VoiceOver under keyboard control yet. You can't simply use your keyboard to move to the title of a song that is playing in a radio app and start selecting and copying bits of the title and artist strings with VoiceOver keyboard shortcuts. At least, I don't know how to do this under iOS 4.1, and I suspect that it's not supported. Under iOS 4.1 on the iPod Touch, I can't even selectively copy web page text with the keyboard in Safari. The best I can do (not using the keyboard), is touch the screen and manage to copy the whole selected page, then edit it in some text editing app. As for typing French accented characters using the keyboard for text entry on your iPhone and using an app like the default Notes app (or I use the free Simplenote app from Codality, since I can then easily sync contents with my computer and with my other iDevices), you can either switch to a French language input keyboard or type accented characters and special symbols using keyboard shortcut combinations that involved holding down the Option key. This is described in several posts on the macvisionaries list, but I'll paste in a quick summary here of Option key combinations to type accented characters with a subset excerpted from the Mac list posts: 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 The above group of keys 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 For punctuation, you can also use the keyboard shortcuts (for the inverted exclamation and question mark of Spanish, and for specialized quotation marks): ¡ inverted exclamation mark Option+1 ¿ inverted question mark Option+Shift+slash (Shift+/ is question mark) ‘ 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 And for the Euro and copyright symbols: € Euro Option+Shift+2 (on a British keyboard this is Option+2) © copyright Option+g Incidentally, I've noticed changes to the Option key shortcut combinations between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.1. One reason that I've not posted a comprehensive list of the Option key shortcuts is that some combinations that I checked under iOS 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 either weren't there, or in a few cases were assigned to characters that differed from the Mac OS X keyboard combinations. Under iOS 4.1, these have been changed to match the Mac OS X keyboard sequences, and symbols that weren't supported (like Option-Shift-K to generate the Apple symbol) have suddenly come back. In a few instances, the keyboard combination generates the special symbols (on the iPhone or iPod Touch), but VoiceOver doesn't announce it, although if you check the same text in a synced file (e.g. through Simplenote) on the Mac, you'll hear the special symbols or characters spoken. This is all too complicated to put up in a list, where I have to mark up the shortcuts that work one way in iOS 4.0 and another way in iOS 4.1, and follow the changes with time, so I've held off posting a complete summary of the option key combinations. Alternatively, you can switch to a language keyboard that has accented characters, if you don't want to use option key combinations. I'd suggest using the Canadian French input language keyboard, which is fairly close to the standard U.S. English input keyboard for entering most letters. For a detailed description of the layout of the Canadian French input keyboard, see this archived macvisionaries list post: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40macvisionaries.com/msg32044.html (Using the Canadian French Keyboard for French Accents) You can select the input language keyboard under Settings > General > International > Keyboards and then switch keyboards with the Command-Space shortcut. The other way you can handle typing accented French (in apps like Simplenote that support it) is to use the TextExpander Touch app ($4.99 from SmileOnMyMac), which allows you to customize your text entry with snippet definitions that include the accented characters. If you were a native French speaker (or other non-English user writing accented characters) who uses the virtual keyboard (not an attached Bluetooth keyboard) for extensive text entry, this is the solution I would recommend. Another suggestion: if you're just learning French, and want to listen to and review what you've written spoken in a fairly nice French voice, get the Speak It! Text to Speech app ($1.99) from FutureApps and buy one of the French Infovox voices for $0.99 through in-app purchase. The default app comes with 4 English Infovox voices (male and female UK English voices -- Graham and Lucy; male and female US English voices -- Ryan and Heather), and will read back text you've copied into the app at the rate you specify in your settings. You can store previous text and access them through history. You can even make (short) recordings and play them back, although the word length limit severely restricts this. If you are a low-vision user, you can set the type font size for your saved text to be pretty large. There's an unlabeled button in the top right corner of the screen that takes you to the Info screen, where you can access the Speak It! store to sample and buy additional voices for other languages. Alternatively, when you first open the app, the introductory dialog window will offer you an option to visit the Speak It! store to review and/or purchase voices for other languages. (I use the "Alice" French Infovox voice for this app.) The only other accessibility/button label issue is that when you double tap the "Speak It!" button at the bottom left corner of the screen this long rectangular button gets replaced with two buttons. The first one (bottom leftmost corner, at the location of the left end of the original "Speak It!" button) is a play/pause button; double tap it if you want to pause Speak It!'s speech and double tap it again to resume speech from where you paused. The second button just to the right (at the positions of the right end of the original rectangular "Speak It!" button) is a stop button. Many users won't pay extra for a text to speech voice or an app that does this kind of reading or recording when the system supports a free voice, but it might be worthwhile to you as a language student. Alternatively, you could consider instead FutureApps' "iSpeak French" app ($1.99) which incorporates a French voice with a translation feature: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ispeak-french/id303492849?mt=8 To read more about "Speak It! Text to Speech", see my archived post on the macvisionaries list: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg19914.html (Speak It! app to use Infovox voices on the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad) HTH. Cheers, Esther On Oct 27, 2010, at 12:19 PM, Kevin Minor <kmi...@windstream.net> wrote: Hey there. First of all, I’m back home from the hospital. Looks like we found the suspect medicine I was taking, and I was switched to something else. We’ll see how it goes. Now for my questions. I didn’t see any responses regarding selecting text on the iPhone using the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. I should mention that I didn’t send this to the aiPhone list, so I’m doing that now. To put it simply, I need to know how I select, copy and paste text using this great keyboard. I thought I understood sort of how this works, but I don’t. I looked through the user’s guide on my iPhone while I was in the hospital, but I didn’t find anything. Now for a new question. How do I enter in accented letters using this keyboard? I have a French class where we do in class writing assignments. I stumbled upon one character by accident, but I’d like to know how to do it for all characters. For those of you who don’t know a foreign language such as French, some letters have what is known as an accent mark above or below them. For example, there is é, à, û and ç. I entered those letters on my PC keyboard, which has a setting to switch to the U.S. international setting where not only these marks are available, but the euro symbol, the copyright symbol and other characters can be entered. Before you think you should switch to this keyboard for entering your text, in order to do this the right alt key is switched to something like a shift key for entering many of these characters, so if you’re used to using it for closing programs or accessing menu choices it may not be what you want to do. The good news about it is you can quickly switch between the standard U.S. keyboard and U.S. international with a handy shortcut key using the CTRL+SHIFT combination. Thanks in advance for any help on this. GO RANGERS! Kevin Minor, Lexington, KY kmi...@windstream.net -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To post to this group, send email to viph...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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