i/s Back Issues

Volume 14

No. 1  September/October 1998

Computer Corner: Foreign Language Characters (Diacritical Marks)

This column presents news and tips from the consultants who staff the Computing Help Desk. Check out their Web site at http://web.mit.edu/helpdesk/.

Q:  I will be typing some foreign language documents in Microsoft Word. How do I create characters with accents and umlauts?

A:  Position the insertion point where you want the character to appear, then use the Symbol palette or shortcut keys, as outlined below. The character will be inserted into the text in the current font.

Symbol Palette
1. Go to the Insert menu and select Symbol... In the Symbol palette, select (normal text) from the Font pull-down menu. 2. Double-click on the desired character. You can leave the Symbol palette open for easy access.

Shortcut Keys
1. Select one of the diacritical marks below by holding down the Option key on the Macintosh or the ctrl key in Windows and pressing the corresponding key in the chart; release both keys.

	Macintosh	Windows
For	Option+	CTRL+
´	e	'
`	`	`
¨	u	:
^	i	^
~	n	~

2. Immediately press the key for the character to which the diacritical is attached; hold down the Shift key for uppercase. For example, to get Ô on the Macintosh, press Option+n, then Shift+o. You should not use these methods to create characters with diacritical marks in Web pages. For these characters to be readable by all Web browsers, you need to use special character codes supported by the HTML specification. For a table listing these codes, go to http://www.uni-passau.de/~ramsch/iso8859-1.html
or look under the Home Page 3.0 Help menu for Special Characters.

i/s Home |  i/s Back Issues |  Volume 14 |  No. 1