Hi Ray, I use the Option key combinations to generate special characters. I'll paste in a short excerpt from a reply that I made to Kevin Minor (actually, he asked about typing French using an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard on his iPhone, but the answer is applicable -- I'll leave out the part describing switching to a French or Canadian French input keyboard). There's a much longer list of special characters out there (and previously posted). My favorite is Option-Shift-K, which generates the Apple sign (). A lot of people use the bullet symbol, Option-asterisk (•). I don't try to insert any special characters from the Character Viewer now. I have a much longer list of special symbols that has been posted before -- but you probably don't want the long list of special math symbols. <begin excerpt> 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 <end excerpt> HTH. Cheers, Esther On May 1, 2011, at 11:34, Ray Foret Jr wrote: > Okay. Here's the thing. If I need to insert special characters, (the acute > accent say) I get stuck. I click on special characters from the menu, find > the character I wish to insert, and press the "insert" button, making sure > the curser is to the right of the character I want to be effected. But, when > I check it, it looks like the special character didn't get inserted. Can't > think what I might be doing wrong. Help? > > Please? Thanks. > > > Sincerely, > The Constantly Barefooted Ray!!! > > Now a very proud and happy Mac user!!! > Skype name: > barefootedray > -- 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.
