how do I type foreign letters into english documents?

williamfromportland wrote:

With my PC I knew how to insert foreign letters into documents using ASCII codes. But I can't figure out how to do these on my Mac. Does anyone know?

For the common accented characters used in European languages, you can use the normal US keyboard layout. The mac uses Alt key shortcuts instead of ascii codes. Alt + e, then e gives you é. Here is a list:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/diacritics.html

Use the Character Viewer to enter special characters and symbols, such as mathematical symbols, letters with accent marks, or arrows and other “dingbats,” into your documents.

You can also use the Character Viewer to enter Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean characters, as well as characters from other languages.

If the character doesn’t appear in your document, you may be using an application that doesn’t support that character. Try using a different character or inserting the character in a different application.

You can also use the Keyboard Viewer to type special characters and symbols.

How to change the Keyboard in OSX

Also set keyboard viewer access from menu bar so you can change at any time

Firstly open System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose Language and Text in the personal column

Click on Input Sources radio button as above and a list of supported languages are offered tick the ones you want to use as above.

The very top one is Keyboard and Character Viewer make sure you tick this

Also tick Show input menu in the menu bar and you will see a flag and Language name added to your menu bar.

You can now switch languages and activate both the on screen keyboard (Relevant to language) and the character viewer globally at any time

My main language is English (British) Qwerty keyboard however also use French/German and Portuguese on a regular basis as can be seen.

As an example this is what you get if you switch to the French (Azerty) layout, of couse your actual keyboard switches as well.

Have a look at System Preferences, Language & Text, Input Sources. There you can activate a keyboard viewer which will let you see and insert letters.

In addition, if you click on the little question mark in the lower right hand corner of the Input Sources window you will get some additional help/documentation.

charlie

Or try Character Viewer. Once you check the box for Keyboard and Character viewer, if you click in the menu bar where the flag indicating what your localization is you should see two extra entries in the drop down.

William, are you sure you are doing this right? Once you have enabled the Character viewer in System Prefs, if you click in the menu bar where the flag indicating what your localization is you should see two extra entries in the drop down.

I have Word, (2011), and can verify that it works.

I got the above from Mac OS Help. Hopefully this is what you need.

charlie