Hi May,
You're confusing the Command key with the Option key for typing
accents and special characters. I'll paste in a repeat excerpted
session from archived posts that describes how to type accented
characters and punctuation marks using 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>
HTH. Cheers,
Esthe
On Jul 8, 2010, May McDonald wrote:
Hi all. I need some help. A while back someone helped out by telling
me how to write in Spanish on the Mac. For some reason my Mac is not
letting me do this. Whenever I try to do command e and then the
letter it doesn't do anything. Is there something I'm doing wrong?
Please get back to me ASAP. I didn't have to start writing in
Spanish until now so that's why I didn't discover this no longer
works until now, thanks.
May
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