There are all remaining polish letters on a keyboard of my iPad: ź,ż,ę,ó,ł,ś,ć but not ą?
iPad, iOS 5
For reference, my 10.11.6 OS X lists the following fonts which should include all characters needed for Unicode Polish and should be usable with all apps via one of the Polish input sources or equivalent unicode input method.
Grodgeman wrote:
If you are writing Polish, Windows is infinitely superior because if, using Word, you go to the special characters insertion window😟
It's hard to believe that even in WIndows anyone writing Polish would still use that clunky 1990's input method. Why wouldn't you just switch to a Polish keyboard layout?
Your Mac info is totally wrong. OS X comes with probably 50 fonts that have all the characters needed for Polish, and Mac users just activate the Polish or Polish Pro keyboards provided by Apple to type natively. Or they can use the ABC Extended keyboard to type using various dead key shortcuts.
This forum is for people who use the iPad. To ask questions or provide help to Mac users, you should go to
If you are writing Polish, Windows is infinitely superior because if, using Word, you go to the special characters insertion window, you are offered for all the latin alphabet languages almost all the possible letters for each font. And can attribute keystrokes. In this respect, MacOS is very poor and limited. There is only ONE font (Luciada CE) that offers all the Polish letters. One might have though that Apple can do better. So I write Polish using a PC and use my Macs for less important things. 😟
Thank you for the reply.
I had not noticed that this particular forum is for the iPad, but since this is where I wrote my original remarks…
Regarding my "Mac info", I have been using Mac since the first version of the Classic and have dabble enough.
The situation is not so simple as you maintain.
I write on a Mac using the French AZERTY keyboard.
I write usually in English and French using the French version of Office with the Mac and the English version on Windows.
The French keyboard has, of course, all the French accentuated letters.
My problem is when Ì have to write Polish and, in this, a Polish keyboard is of little use to me, personally.
You say the MacOs comes with all the fonts offering Polish letters.
Is this true?
ONLY the Lucida Grande font offers a CE version and access to specifically Polish letters.
OK if you want everything to be in that rather drab font.
The problem runs deeper and had to do with the fact that Microsoft has always kept the Mac version of Office somewhat inferior to the Windows version.
Here is the scenario: I want to write in Polish quickly and easily and to use a simple keystroke (ALT+letter) when necessary.
Using Word for Windows, in the menu or ribbon, or whatever, I go to:
Insert —> Symbol —> More symbols —> Georgia (my favorite) and see a window with a vertical scroll bar and which gives displays ALL the possible letters of the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets in this font.
A choose the letter I want and attribute a key stroke ONCE AND FOR ALL—usually ALT+…
Now do the same thing in Office for Mac (sorry for the French, but…):
Insertion —> Symbole —> Symbole avancé and choose Times New Roman (because Georgia does not exist in my setup)
and all I have is one small static window which displays basic Anglo-American ASCII and all sorts of odds and ends that nobody I know uses (perhaps programmers?).
The ONLY font that offers a little static window is Lucida Grande CE (latin extended).
That's fine if you want to use that drab font for everything.
Open/LibreOffice offers the same possibilities as Office for Windows except that the keystroke is, actually, a simple and invisible macro command.
So much for Mac and the necessity to use "that clunky 1990's input method".
Try all this for yourself.
I haven't bothered to see if Pages does any better because it does not have what I really need (line numbering, outline mode…).
To be totally honest, I do know that, if one keeps a letter pressed down, a small window does appear and which allows you to choose a variant letter.
But one might ask if Apple have ever bothered to find a semi-literate Polish speaker and asked about the specifically Polish letters (incidentally, most people do not know that Poland—being a Catholic country and an integral part of western Latin culture—the Polish language uses the Latin alphabet with a few additions).
The result is that the little menus is horribly incomplete (at least on MacOS), lacking the basic and indispensable nasal A (A+ogonek) and the accentuated Z and S.
However, and this might help other frustrated MacOS users, the Polish dictation function on MacOS does a very honest job, aided by the fact that the sounds of Polish are clear and well-distinct and constant.
I also use a Sticky note on the side with the Polish letters neatly typed in and travel back in time to the 1990's.
If Apple bothered to put right the letter choice menu a lot of misery would be avoided, but I see from various sites and forums that the moans of the suffering have—so far—remained unheeded.
A little extra remark: The letters in the choice menu are accompanied by numbers, which is fine, except that on the French keyboard the numbers are upper-case, which means added manipulation.
User friendliness?
Look into it.
Cheers and have a good day.
Grodgeman
France.
Thanks for providing more details about your problem.
To use a French keyboard to type Polish with Mac Word, you need to use Apple's Character Viewer (Edit > Emoji & Symbols) instead of Word's Insert Advanced Symbol. Copy the proper characters from the Latin category into Tools > Autocorrect to set up your shortcuts. Once that is done most fonts should be usable.
The same should be true if you use your French layout and LibreOffice and its own Insert > Special Character plus Tools > Autocorrect.
I would recommend you not use Polish characters from Lucida Grande CE as they are non-Unicode and you can't be totally sure how they will display when read on other machines.
You might want to consider creating a custom French keyboard layout with the extra characters you need for Polish. This would be pretty easy to do with
http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele
and again all fonts would be usable.
Hello.
Thanks for the reply.
I know about the (Byzantine) character viewer, but apart from letting one more or less copy and paste a Polish letter, it serves very little useful purpose.
There is NO way to attribute keystrokes of any kind to any choice of letter.
As far as auto-correct is concerned, I have tried EVERYTHING.
It is impossible to enter a keystroke that would print the desired letter.
What I want, is to be able to type a Polish letter wth a simple 'ctrl+letter' keystroke—which is what Office for Windows (used on a MacBook Pro with Parallels) allows me to do.
On the Mac; I have been more or less (and laboriously) able to obtain the Polish "ą" with auto-correction, but only by typing "&a", or other hybrid, with all the problems that follow.
Other letters are obdurate.
Using the Polish keyboard is—for me—NOT a solution,.
I have even tried to look into 'services', but there is no obvious macro command (as there was in System 6 & 7, etc).
So, thanking you for your time, I'll get back to using Windows on a Mac (which seems a bit of a waste as, in France, I could buy three usable PCs for the price of one MacBook Air), or Linux Mint and OpenOffice on a PC. 😟
If ever anyone finds a solution to all this…
Anyone, as Apple itself is unlikely to provide a solution—their whole philosophy being to make their products impenetrable (compare Android and iOS !!!).
Cheers, and thanks again.
Grodgeman (sunny morning in western France).
Grodgeman wrote:
There is NO way to attribute keystrokes of any kind to any choice of letter.
As far as auto-correct is concerned, I have tried EVERYTHING.
It's a quirk of word autocorrect that only certain characters can be used for single character replacements, if that is what you require. See if any of these work for you: &, $, §, ∞, ÷. There are probably others.
A custom keyboard layout is only a few minutes work too. That is what Mac users would normally use for your kind of situation, since it would work in all apps. How many characters do you needed added to the Apple French layout?
Thanks for the answer.
Frustrating business.
I've tried different combinations and wasted too much time.
So I'll just get back to Parallels and Windows and Office—which works easily and seamlessly for my needs.
End of subject.
Perhaps Apple will wake up one day when they recover the notion of user friendliness.
Cheers and good day to you, wherever you may be.
Grodgeman wrote:
I've tried different combinations and wasted too much time.
So I'll just get back to Parallels and Windows and Office
Understood! But I am truly curious, can you not get your Word Mac, for example, to autocorrect § to ą ? It seems to work perfectly on mine (2016) with the French keyboard active.
Hello, and thanks again.
I suppose that what you suggest is possible, but not intuitive or "natural".
Polish needs extra accentuated forms (upper and lower case) of the letters
a z (2) e o s l c n (= 18 extra letters).
It is so much easier (and needs no memory work or skipping around the keyboard) to get them using an "alt+letter(shift)" combination.
A Mac + Parallels + Windows 7 + Office 2000 (+ Microsoft Proofing Tools) / Windows 10 + Office 2016 does all impeccably.
Cheers and have a good day.
G.
Grodgeman wrote:
Polish needs extra accentuated forms (upper and lower case) of the letters
a z (2) e o s l c n (= 18 extra letters).
You are right, I had forgotten how many extra letters are needed on the French keyboard.
There is already an English version of what you need -- Apple's Polish Pro input source is just a standard English qwerty layout with all the Polish characters on the option/alt level. I'm surprised someone has not done the same yet for French azerty.
Yeah, the same question... No "ą" letter on iPad. It's ridiculous...
With my iPad set to Polish in Settings/General/International/Language, my iPad has the letter.
I have the same problem on my iPhone.
Apple are you reading this? Cmon! I'm English but I live in Poland, I shouldn't have to copy and paste the "ą" character every time I need it.
Similarly I shouldn't have to go to general settings and switch to Polish every time I want to use just this single letter!
Cmon Apple, you're better than that, surely?
Con G wrote:
I shouldn't have to go to general settings and switch to Polish every time I want to use just this single letter!
That would certainly be cumbersome. Normally you just add Polish to your keyboard list (setting > general > keyboard > keyboards > add new keyboard) and then use the globe key to quickly switch to that keyboard when you need it. Using the Polish keyboard also gives you Polish spellcheck.
To ask Apple to add that letter to the English keyboard, you should go to
How to type polish letter ą on iPad? There ara all remaining polish letters:ź,ż,ł,ó,ę,ś but not ą.
