Icelandic characters

Question

Icelandic characters

hey everyone, i started learning some icelandic in college and if i want to write something on the mac it's rather complicated to get the letters ð and þ. it's not impossible in iwork, i found a workaround here http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070809083657729, but i actually had to go to pages and make the letters there and copy&paste them into this form in order to get them. is there an easier way in leopard?

20" iMac, 2.4 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 1, 2008 8:31 AM

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

124,784 points

Nov 1, 2008 9:40 AM in response to germanintheburgh

Go to system prefs/international/input menu and check the box for US Extended, plus the box for "show input menu in Finder". Then select US Extended in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder. Then you can type Alt/Option + d for ð and Alt/Option + t for þ.

Answer 2

Rothrock

Level 4

1,467 points

Nov 1, 2008 11:07 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Or you could turn on the Icelandic keyboard. It puts a dead key on the apostrophe so if you need accents over vowels that would be pretty easy. And the special characters you just asked about are on the regular keyboard. Of course I haven´t figured out where the keys they replace went....

Anyways, the ð is on the left square brace and þ is on the forward slash.

Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

124,784 points

Nov 2, 2008 2:08 PM in response to germanintheburgh

i've forgot to mention that i'm using german keyboard with the german layout that i actually want to stick with.

It would only take a couple minutes to make a custom German layout that has eth and thorn at some keys you don't otherwise need, using Ukelele:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?siteid=nrsi&itemid=ukelele

Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

124,784 points

Nov 1, 2008 11:54 AM in response to Rothrock

Or you could turn on the Icelandic keyboard.

Actually that is probably a better idea, since it also lets you type æ and ö without extra keys.

User uploaded file

Answer 5

Nov 2, 2008 1:15 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

thank you so much guys, i've forgot to mention that i'm using german keyboard with the german layout that i actually want to stick with. good thing about this is that i can actually make ö and all the accented letters without any problems. the only two letters missing are eth and thorn, like in við and þau. on the german layout æ is easy: option+ä

Answer 6

Nov 3, 2008 11:07 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

thank you so much! this is perfect.