How to type french accents?

fane_j wrote:

Which ones? I have two purchased this year, and both have "Option", with "Alt" above and in smaller type.

This is the forum for MacBook Pro, and some of them have the form of key shown below:

Tom, Tom. Now you're being naughty. You know very well, probably better than I do, that on some Mac keyboards the words "command" and "option" are replaced by the Bowen knot or the apple (or both) for the former and ⌥ (U+2325, or "OPTION KEY" -- yep, that's its genuine Unicode name) for the latter. And if you look at Switch 101: On Windows, I used to... you'll see it listed as the Mac equivalent of the Alt key on Windows. This is Mac, so let's talk Mac; and let's talk Windows when we discuss Windows.

Cattus Thraex wrote:

There are basically two ways to get what you need:

Why have you left out the 3rd way, using the OS X 10.7 Character Picker described by iHing?

If you have an international keyboard:

ALT+e gives the accent-écu, Alt+` gives the accent-grave, Alt+^ gives the cironflex, Alt+u gives the trema:

after typing your accent you type the letter underneath.

You can also use the Characterviewer (make it visible in the menu bar), search the letters you often use and put them in "favorites" in the characterviewer.

LexSchellings is describing the French accents, without changing your American (international) keyboard settings. But sarahfromlasalle is asking how to type the French characters switching the keyboard to French layout.

Open Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources

There is a radio button on top of a large list of keyboard settings. Here you check Keyboard & Character Viewer. On bottom check the radio button "Show Input menu in menu bar".

Now you see a flag on top right of your menu. The currently chosen keyboard layout is shown with the flag of the country. Here you click on it, you chose French layout and than you go on "Show Keyboard Viewer". This window shows you exactly the French layout and all accented characters.

marek

Correct, but this is really cumbersome because you have constantly have to check the keyboard layout, since physically the keyboard is not changed...

And more accents than these 4 are normally not used...

LexSchellings wrote:

Correct, but this is really cumbersome because you have constantly have to check the keyboard layout, since physically the keyboard is not changed...

And more accents than these 4 are normally not used...

And the French keyboard is AZERTY instead of QWERTY which will probably cause lots of typing errors...

You are right! Or you have to type them blindly as I do. It is great fun, typing for example with the Cyrillic keyboard. The layout in Russia is much better compared to qwertz-layout (German) or qwerty (American) or azerty (French). The often used characters are under the most "intelligent" finger, the index ... Roughly.

marek

There are basically two ways to get what you need:

1. Switch to a French keylayout. This is normal in France or other French speaking countries, just that French keylayout has a lot of changes as compared to U.S. keylayout.

2. Using dead keys, which are achieved via pressing Option key and a series of other keys. U.S. default keylayout has 5 dead keys, which cover the needs for French: e = acute; ` = grave (left to Z or left to 1, depending on the physical keyboard you have); u = umlaut; i = circumflex; n = tilde. For French, you need just 3, acute, grave and circumflex.

If you activate Keyboard Viewer (where you activated French keylayout) you will have a dynamic way of viewing how dead keys work. Open a test blank page in TextEdit or any other word processor, and practise a little bit. This may prove faster than using a French keylayout.

LexSchellings wrote:

You are correct that is on the MBA+OSLion, like on theiOS on the iPhone/iPad. But the OP is talking about MacBookPro.

Why do you think there would be some difference between the MBA+OSLion of iHing and the MacBookPro + OSLion, which is what the OP has?

Correct, but I assumed that picking chars for certain purposes is something else than writing at a reasonable speed in French. I cannot imagine anyone writing, say, 10 pages in French by picking é è and ê all the time via Character Viewer, this action would take a week instead of 2-3 hours, depending on the ability to write in French.

Folks, if you set out to list all the possible ways of putting in 'French' characters, you've forgotten Unicode Hex Input. And one or two others.

The real point here is underlined by Cattus Thraex. Why does the OP need to enter these characters?

Is it for, say, an essay for History class on the age of Louis XIV? In that case, assuming she is using one of the US layouts, she doesn't really need to change anything. To spell correctly a few names of places and characters, using the traditional Mac way with the Option key ("Option", mon cher LexSchellings, not "Alt" -- let's talk Mac here) is fine.

However, if she's doing homework for a French class, and she needs to enter lengthy paragraphs, and she needs to do this more than once, then such a method is a major PITA, whose only virtue is that it's less of a PITA than any of the other methods suggested (Character Viewer indeed!) The only effective way to enter French text is to learn to type in French on a French-language keyboard layout. And there are basically three built-in options here:

(1) French (AZERTY -- there are actually two of them)

(2) Canadian French (CSA/ACNOR, based on QWERTY)

(3) Swiss French (based on QWERTZ)

She needs to choose the one closest to what she's accustomed to, and learn to touch type on it. If the OP is, as seems to be the uniform assumption, American or anglophone Canadian, hence familiar with QWERTY, then the CSA/ACNOR keyboard is best.

Finally, to be effective, she needs not only to enable the Input menu, but also to set a shortcut to cycle through enabled keyboard layouts, which is done in Keyboard Shortcuts.

I think that for all those accustomed to the basic U.S. keylayout, Canadian French keylayout is the closest possible and allows an easy approach to the issue ‘let us write in French while being Americans’. All the other methods ae too cumbersome for lengthy texts, but reasonable to insert a French word from time to time, e.g. a linguistic paper or a paper on French history.

Cattus Thraex wrote:

I cannot imagine anyone writing, say, 10 pages in French by picking é è and ê all the time via Character Viewer

I was referring to Character Picker, not Character Viewer. You should become aware of this new feature of 10.7 if you are not already.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/os_x_lion_using_and_disabling_the_charact er_picker/

This is the method used in iOS devices and many users will find it easier than the others.

fane_j wrote:

("Option", mon cher LexSchellings, not "Alt" -- let's talk Mac here)

That would be a mistake, because many users have no key labeled Option, but they always have one labeled Alt. I think even some Apple keyboards no longer have Option printed on them.