Accent Short Cuts

Apple has always had a method of associating accents with their most commonly attached letters.

á é í ó ú are made by typing opt e then the vowel

ä ë ï ö ü are made by typing opt u then the vowel

â ê î ô û are made by typing opt i then the vowel

à è ì ò ù are made by typing opt ` (above the tab key) then the vowel

ñ is made by typing opt n then the letter

There are many more including the Scandinavian å ø which are just the option + the vowel.

The same with ç ß ∂ ƒ µ etc.

Unlike in Windows, this is System wide including the Finder and worth learning, not that it is hard because it is regular.

Peter

Hi Charlie,

Anything available directly from the keyboard can be seen using Keyboard Viewer, found in the Input Menu section of the International Pane of System Preferences.

How you get the accents depends on the keyboard layout you are using (and possibly on the coding of the font you are using).

On the US or Canadian layouts you can get these special characters:

à é ü î ñ å ç

The last two are single stroke key combinations - option-a and option-c

The others are two stroke combinations - option-accent, then letter
The first stroke produces a zero-width accent character, then the second produces the letter that sits under the accent. The accents can be applied only to letters that would use that accent.

Accent keys are option plus the letter that is shown with the accent (e, u, i and n), and ` for the accent over the first a.

For more about adding accents, see Mac Help (in the Help menu when you are in the Finder) and search "adding accent marks".

Regards,
Barry

Barry,

The option accent method is not achieved by assembling 2 characters, as you can easily test by nudging the cursor through the characters.

It is an input method. The option accent forms a dead key which waits on a following character before inputting the correct accented character.

Apple was way in front of everyone implementing this almost from the beginning in the Classic Mac OS.

Peter

Apple has always had a method of associating accents with their most commonly attached letters.
Unlike in Windows, this is System wide including the Finder and worth learning, not that it is hard because it is regular.

God forbid that one would learn this non-sense -:). In the year of our Lord 2009 this idea is headed for the scrap heap as competion for interfaces and input methods for ISO-IEC 10646-1:1993 and higher increases.

In the industrial design of the graphic computer, the idea of multilingual input methods was that the hardware was a teletypewriter with a television on top. The teletypewriter keyboard graphically exposed one writing system in the ISO 646:1973 family and exposed neighbouring writing systems graphicallly with what came to be called modifier keys followed by letter keys.

/hh

Henrik,

Short of a keyboard like the monster ones that used to be used in Chinese typesetting, what do you suggest as an alternative?

Peter

Hi, I normally use Microsoft Word for text editing but have switched to using Pages.

Many Windows users are familiar with the "US International" layout for typing accented characters. You can download one of these to install on your Mac here if you are interested:

http://www.brockerhoff.net/usi/

Short of a keyboard like the monster ones that used to be used in Chinese typesetting, what do you suggest as an alternative?

I think Henrik may like the Optimus:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2008/08/optimus-multilingual-keyboard.html

Probably still pretty far off as practical and affordable option.

CAUTION

The input method is not the same worldwide.
It is linked to the language which is used by the operating system.
Most of the shortcuts which where given in this thread doesn't apply when the main language is French (or German, Spabish, Italian …)

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE jeudi 16 avril 2009 18:22:18)

PopChar is a useful app. for seeing all letters and it will also give you the key baord shortcut!

fruhulda wrote:
PopChar is a useful app. for seeing all letters and it will also give you the key baord shortcut!

What does PopChar bring that Keyboard Viewer does not give?

You must buy it

but it displays the shortcuts which Keyboard Viewer doesn't.

I take the opportunity to pass a tip for Azerty users.
When shift lock is depressed, typing the keys éèà return ÉÈÀ;
It's easier than the official 'longcut' 😉

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE jeudi 16 avril 2009 22:22:47)

You can download PopChar and try it. I find it easier to find "odd" letters than with Keyboard viewer. You can also see letters ans sign you don't see with keybaord viewer.

I think Henrik may like the Optimus:

Nope, Henrik likes industrial design that integrates hardware and software intelligently. That is possible if and only if the concept of the input method is conceived as well from the OS side as from the hardware side.

Apple has two patents which, if the industrial design of the Character Palette were improved, would be workable. One patent dynamically changes the key graphics using diodes in the keys and another patent displays the input method on a touch surface.

The former patent would work with the industrial design of a computer following the Macintosh of 1984 and the Xerox 8010 of 1981, that is, the conventional industrial design of a teletypewriter combined with a television as a three part desktop computer.

The latter patent would work with the industrial design of a portable computer where the display is the front of the computer casing. The display is dedicated to graphic output. A hinged plate that opens at an angle to the casing is dedicated to graphic input.

The hinged plate is a touch surface whose graphic input interface can be generated in software. If the active application is Logic Pro, the graphic input interface is for authoring music. If the active application is Aperture, the graphic input interface is for authoring stills. And so forth.

Both Apple and Microsoft are working on operating systems that support touch surfaces. As the information economy switches from hardcopy to softcopy, it is critical that input methods migrate from dedicated monolingual (with a mess of modifiers for multilingual input) to dedicated multilingual. Ultimately, this is impossible in the model Steven Capps created for the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh (hence the KeyCaps desk accessory).

There are some snags in the TrueType Specification. First, multiple CMAP subtables are permissible without a guarantee that the union of the CMAPs is the repertoire of ISO-IEC 10646, and second, multiple CMAP subtables are used for language-specific shaping (as per Opstad and Jenkins). Multiple CMAPs whose union was not necessarily ISO-IEC 10646 was part of the premise for cross-platform drawing in TrueType Specification version 1.0 of June 1990 (the other was the TrueType spline programming langauge that would be rendered in Apple QuickDraw and Microsoft Graphic Device Interface without a third party interpreter / scaler / rasteriser such as the subset of PostScript in the Adobe Type Manager and Bitstream Facelift for Type 1 splines).

/hh

This would work how with touch typing?

It is like those kids organs that light up the key you are supposed to play. Not exactly conducive to real music however.

Peter

Short of a keyboard like the monster ones that used to be used in Chinese typesetting, what do you suggest as an alternative?

Technically, the industrial design of input methods are derived from the Remington TYPE-WRITER Model 1 of 1874 and the International Telegraph Alphabet No 1 of 1874.

Wheatstone, Hughes and Baudot had the idea of an input method derived from the piano keyboard which increases the number of keys by increasing the length of the input method.

Sholes had the idea of adapting the Morse key by placing the slender and space saving keys in tiers one above the other - more like an organ than like a piano, if you will.

Samuel Clemens bought a Remington in Boston for USD 125. He wrote his brother Orion about the machine, see the Clemens correspondence published by the University of California.

The Library of the British Museum considered the Remington for its card catalogue, but in 1875 decided otherwise as the machine had neither lower case Latin (: English), loose diacritics for Latin (: French, German, Spanish), ligated letters for Latin (: French, German, Nordic), nor Greek.

The first lower case national coded character sets were published for English (ANSI X3.4) and German (DIN 60 003) in 1963. The first upper case and lower case international standard character set without Latin diacritics and Latin ligations was published in 1973 (ISO 646). The first international standard with loose diacritics for Latin with serial spelling was published in 1983 (ISO 6937 and ISO 5426)) and the first international standard for Latin with single spelling was published in 1987 (ISO 8859-1).

ANSI Z39.47 for computerised cataloguing was based on loose diacritics for impact printers used in card cataloguing in 1968. The Xerox Coded Character Set for Xerox Interpress and the Xerox 100ppm laser printers was based on loose diacritics for non-impact printers to limit the RAM requirements in imaging (PostScript version 23 in the original Apple LaserWriter did something of the same). ISO 6937 and ISO 5426 were similarly designed for impact printers - nobody had any concept of the everyday enduser interacting with the character string after printing.

The business with key modifiers in the input method is the same as the business with productive/generative character coding models for impact printers and low memory non-impact printers. The reality is that the information economy of the European Union is in part running an a page description model - PostScript and its derivative PDF - introduced in 1985 and deliberated without a foundation on a coded character set in the first place. Getting Adobe and Heidelberg to whisper in public that Type 1 and PS to PDF is dead is well neigh impossible.

Getting a public discussion of the fact that the industrial design of the personal computer that was so successful for PostScript paper publishing is still more of a struggle -:).

/hh