At 8:21 AM -0400 6/27/07, Sharon Henderson wrote:
International diacritics on a Mac are reasonably easy: hold down the Option key, type the letter it affects (if you want the Spanish "upside-down question mark" type the question mark, the upside-down exclamation point is Option + 1... German ess-tset is option + s). Some of them are a little more involved: because the French accents get the option + e, Umlauts have to be option + u + e (or i or a...)
That is, to type an "e" with an umlaut, type option+u, then type e; to type a "u" with an umlaut, type option+u, then type u; and so on. For typable accents/diacritics, the Mac works on the idea that you type the key combination to produce the diacritic, then type the letter the diacritic goes over/on. Acute accent is option+e (then the letter it goes over), grave accent is option+grave accent key (then the letter it goes over), umlaut is option+u (then the letter it goes over), circumflex is option+i (then the letter it goes over), tilde is option+n (then the letter it goes over), and so on. Note that for these common diacritics, the key combined with option to produce the diacritic is that of a letter most/very commonly used/associated with that diacritic (thus, u for umlaut, n for tilde, e for acute accent, etc.), which makes it easier to remember.
There is a web page that lists them all by language (at least for the main ones; more esoteric ones can probably be found elsewhere): http://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/Language_Lab/accentsmac.htm
There is also the option of using either the keyboard viewer or the character palette. The keyboard viewer shows what keys to type to produce letters (including special highlighting of keys used in the kind of additive diacritic combinations described above). So, in keyboard viewer, if you press option it shows you what letters would be produced by each key pressed while option is held down, with the some keys marked a different color to show that they are added to whatever it typed next.
The character palette lets you enter any character from any font (including all the weird and wonderful things available now via Unicode) and has a "favorites" feature to make it even easier to insert characters you use frequently (I have thorns, edhs, yoghs, and schwas in my favorites ;-).
In Mac OS 10.4.x at least (and probably earlier versions), the keyboard viewer and character palette are accessed via the Input Menu marked by the little flag towards the right hand side of the menu bar (for those using U.S. keyboard, the flag is a US flag, etc.). If you don't have the flag menu, or it doesn't have character palette as an option, then go to System Preferences, choose International, choose Input Menu, then make sure the check boxes are checked for "Show input menu in menu bar", "Character Palette" and "Keyboard viewer".
Sharon -- Sharon Krossa, PhD - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Resources for Scottish history, names, clothing, language & more: Medieval Scotland - http://www.MedievalScotland.org/ Shopping Online? Help support! - http://MedievalScotland.org/patron/ The most complete index of reliable web articles about pre-1600 names: The Medieval Names Archive - http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/ _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
