French accents under MS WORD ? help beginner...
diel...@oregon.uoregon.edu
I have a very stupid question to ask... A friend of mine is taking
French in Grad school, therefore using Ms Word she wants to access all those
lovely accents and extra characters that the US keyboard doesn't show !
Being French myself I never thought I could be faced with such a
questio
Therefore the question is how do you get those extra ASCII characters
through the US keyboard, is there a way like on other computers to configure
the keyboard in French ? should she buy a French Keyboard ?
This is a really basic question from a begginner so please don't blame
me, I have a good knowledge of computers but it is neither Apple neither IBM
because they are too expensive in France. (in fact I'm an Atari 1040stf
user... which is also a MC68000 machine)
Thanks for you reply at the following adress,
Friendly, Jean-Philippe DIEL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Diel Jean-Philippe MBA 1 University of Oregon, EUGENE USA
Bitnet = DIELJEAN@OREGON
Internet= DIEL...@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vincent M. Del Vecchio
> under MS.. Joseph Hough...@cs.al (2256)
> To get an accent, type option-e followed by the letter to be accented.
> To type a grave, type option-` followed by the letter
> To type a circumflex, type option-i followed by the letter.
> To type an umlaut, type option-u folloed by the letter
> To type the symbol that goes over the 'n' in the spanish Senor (I forget
> what it's called), type option-n and the letter.
To type a c with a cedilla (I think that's what it's called), hold down
option and type a c. Another "Apple mnemonic"...
Jon Matousek
>Hi everybody,
>
> I have a very stupid question to ask... A friend of mine is taking
>French in Grad school, therefore using Ms Word she wants to access all those
>lovely accents and extra characters that the US keyboard doesn't show !
>
> Being French myself I never thought I could be faced with such a
>questio
>
> Therefore the question is how do you get those extra ASCII characters
>through the US keyboard, is there a way like on other computers to configure
>the keyboard in French ? should she buy a French Keyboard ?
>
> This is a really basic question from a begginner so please don't blame
>me, I have a good knowledge of computers but it is neither Apple neither IBM
>because they are too expensive in France. (in fact I'm an Atari 1040stf
>user... which is also a MC68000 machine)
>
> Thanks for you reply at the following adress,
>
> Friendly, Jean-Philippe DIEL
>
Try Nisus:
Paragon sells a Nisus French (and others) dictionary for $30 each.
During spell checking, words that are to be accented get flagged and
the correctly accented word is offered as a replacement. By relying on
the spelling checker to accent words you do not have to remember the
combinations required for the different accented letters.
But, if you must manually accent, and you do not remember how
to get the accented character, Nisus has an "ASCII" window that
allows you to view and scroll through all the characters of any font, and
with a double click insert a particular character into your document.
Cheers,
-jOn
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Ross Yahnke, MACC
>>French in Grad school, therefore using Ms Word she wants to access all those
>>lovely accents and extra characters that the US keyboard doesn't show !
I've found one of the best solutions to this problem is the PopChar init
that puts a hot spot in one corner of your screen. When you mouse down
in that corner a pop-up menu appears with every single character in the
current font displayed. You can then select the character and PopChar
will place the character in your document. And as you move the mouse
over various characters, PopChar will display the correct key sequence
necessary to actually type the indicated character. Very unobtrusive,
stable, and worthwhile, if you ask me... PD from sumex. - Ross
>>> yah...@macc.wisc.edu <<<
Michel Pasquier
>> Therefore the question is how do you get those extra ASCII characters
>>through the US keyboard, is there a way like on other computers to configure
>>the keyboard in French ? should she buy a French Keyboard ?
to which, in article <40...@network.ucsd.edu> Jon Matousek (j...@weber.ucsd.edu)
did answer:
>Try Nisus: [advertising stuff deleted :-]
Oh, come on. Nisus is certainly a very nice application and I wish I had it
sometimes when Word cannot do such or such thing... BUT Jean Diel asked for
an answer using Word, not for an advice about buying a new software...
Anyway, here we are. As far as I know there are two ways to produce the
french special characters (or the german or spanish ones for that matter).
When one uses a french system, the fonts provided have these special
characters designed in the non-standard part of the ASCII table (ie codes
> 128). Then the special keys on a french keyboard are mapped to these special
characters - just press the key and "le tour est joue". However, not all fonts
do have these additional characters (by far) so that this becomes pretty soon
a limitation. [I think I noticed that the first time I changed a normal french
sentence from, say, Times to Venice. All the special accentuated characters
were then replaced by blank squares!!!]
The other way has the advantage to work with any font and a US keyboard. But,
as a drawback, characters input is a little less immediate. What happens is
that the accents are available through particular option keys, and if followed
by a voyel the two characters are superimposed, producing the correct special
accentuated character. Namely:
' (accent aigu) is [option e], ` (accent grave) is [option `] (<backquote>)
^ (accent circonflexe) is [option i] and : (trema) is [option u]
Thus e' (e accent aigu) is produced by typing: [<option> e] <e>, the a` (a
accent grave) by typing [<option> <backquote>] <a>, and u^ (u accent circon-
flexe) by [<option> <i>] <u> etc.
This way, one can superimpose any accent on any voyel, producing even illegal
characters. Note also that the "c," (c cedille) is directly available through
[option c].
Since french contains a lot of these accentuated characters, typing can become
really painfull. A solution is to use MacroMaker (or any such macro utility)
and bind these sequences to something more convenient.
I use myself the <control> key, unused anyway, with such bindings as
<control e> for e', <control w> (the next one on the keyboard) for e` and
<control r> for e^, <control a> for a` etc.
Then, despite the usage of a US keyboard, only one keystroke is necessary to
input french special characters in any application (even Nisus :-).
Now I can input and mix easily english, french, german, spanish and japanese
in the same text... I'll tell you, the Mac is really a *great* computer.
-Michel.
--
Michel Pasquier ........................ AIST/MITI Guest Researcher
ElectroTechnical Laboratory . Intelligent Machine Behaviour Section
Tsukuba, Ibaraki 205, Japan . Tel: 298-58-5964 . Fax: 298-55-1729
Email: mic...@etl.go.jp . "I've no employer, so who do I speak for?
Paul Kohlmiller
>In article <20263.2...@oregon.uoregon.edu> Jean Diel (diel...@oregon.uoregon.edu) had asked:
>>> Therefore the question is how do you get those extra ASCII characters
>>>through the US keyboard, is there a way like on other computers to configure
>>>the keyboard in French ? should she buy a French Keyboard ?
Has anyone suggested the INIT called PopChar. This gives a very easy way to get
to those characters that are available but don't appear on your keyboard. This
INIT is Shareware and available in lots of places.
--
// Paul H. Kohlmiller // "Cybers, Macs and Mips" //
// Control Data Corporation // Internet: pa...@u02.svl.cdc.com //
// All comments are strictly // America Online: Paul CDC //
// my own. // Compuserve: 71170,2064 //
Stephen Graham
>mic...@etl.go.jp (Michel Pasquier) writes:
>
>>In article <20263.2...@oregon.uoregon.edu> Jean Diel (diel...@oregon.uoregon.edu) had asked:
>
>>>> Therefore the question is how do you get those extra ASCII characters
>>>>through the US keyboard, is there a way like on other computers to configure
>>>>the keyboard in French ? should she buy a French Keyboard ?
>
>Has anyone suggested the INIT called PopChar. This gives a very easy way to get
>to those characters that are available but don't appear on your keyboard. This
>INIT is Shareware and available in lots of places.
>
The simplest answer, as has been pointed out, is that the standard
additional letters for most European languages are available as
option-<key> as part of the standard Mac interface. The simplest
way to find them is through KeyCaps (which is why this is provided).
While doing an option-keystroke for letters may seem tedious for
some people, I have found it easy to become accustomed to through
frequent use.
You should also know that both Nisus and Word have foreign-language
spelling dictionaries available (though US$75 is a bit expensive
for the Word ones). I dimly recall that similar dictionaries are
available for MacWrite. Oh, yes, PageMaker also has optional
foreign-language spelling&hyphenation dictionaries available,
again at a relatively high price.
Steve Graham
gra...@isis.ee.washington.edu