Accent marks - How do I put a caron over a capital Z?

Hi, Jessica.

According to Wikipedia:

On Mac OS X's 'Extended' keyboard (US layout only: there is no extended layout for other languages) layouts the caron is typed by pressing option-v followed by the letter you want. The combination shift-option-v will produce a combining caron appended to the previous character.

It works for me Ž !!

Edit: Oops, but I went back and tried it in AppleWorks, and it was a no-go, there. Maybe it takes a newer version than my 6.2.4, or maybe Pages? Or maybe some font other than Times (which is what I was using). Back to the drawing board.

Unfortunately, Ronda, AppleWorks just can't use unicode, which the extended keyboard is. Try to type with a unicode keyboard & AppleWorks will crash.

Peggy

Hello

There is an easy way to know which characters are usable in AppleWorks.

Create a new spreadsheet
in cell A1 type: =CHAR(ROW())

Use the fill down tool to copy this formula fro A1 thru A255.

The cells A1..A255 will display the available characters.
Of course you may set a lirge character size to make the list easy to read.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 11 février 2006 9:12:57)

If I could not do it any other way, I would try to find a sample of the character on the internet, do a screen shot of just that character and use a font that matches it. Then you can try pasting it in where needed. Ugly, ungainly solution which may not work, but I would try it.

That won't work well in Appleworks, Ronda. Even doing ornamental drop caps as graphics can be nightmarishly fiddly. I can't imagine doing a long text block with many refs that way.

FWIW, Option Shiftt gives you ˇ but I don't know how to create it over a letter.

Hello

Some "old-fashioned" fonts, the ones with chars code from 0 thru 255 contains chars with caron.
It is not truly easy to switch between two fonts for a single text but it may be the solution.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 14 février 2006 22:07:30)

Even doing ornamental drop caps as graphics can be nightmarishly fiddly.

Sorry to drag this thread dangerously toward "off topic" territory, but this comment prompts me to mention that drop caps can be managed with relative ease by making them with the Equation Editor. One only needs to "fiddle" once with size and font (in equation editor) and Descent... (from the AW Format menu). After that, it's pretty much copy-and-paste.

Now, back to our regular programming.

Remaining OT,

Using the Equation editor and Descent inserts the capital as an inline object, which means there'll be a single line of text to its right, with the next line dropping to a position below the capital, leaving a large white space.

Better to place the capital into a Text frame, size the frame to as small as possible to contain the single letter, then apply Text wrap to the frame and drag it into position. This also allows you to apply a background colour or pattern to the frame and to colour the letter if you wish.

And now, back to our regular programming...

Barbara is right about a graphic solution to the lack of carons being fiddly, especialy in quantity. For small quantities, though, it's workable. I've used this technique to insert schwa characters (the upside-down e used to indicate the vowel sound in an unstressed syllable) in students' exercise pages. One hint here: Once you've established the Descent setting necessary (I inserted these as inline objects), copy the inserted object AND at least one preceding character to use as your object for pasting. Adding the character preserves the Descent setting so that you don't have to set it every time you use the object.

Regards,
Barry

Hello

Trickery against trickery, why not put the standard letter in the main text body and the caron (or any other accent) in a floating text frame.
The text will have the same look for every chars and the accents will be available.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mercredi 15 février 2006 9:37:14)

Works for me, Yvan.

I was thinking of what I'd done with a single character rather than an accent. The advantage to placing it as an inline object, of course, is that it's then tied into a position in the text (and moves with the text if preceding text is revised, rather than being fixed to a position on the page.

Regards,
Barry

Yes, I was presuming that the caron over the Z was an infrequently necessary character. I know it's not easy. I said it was an ugly thing to have to try.

Doing just the accent as a graphics frame would be an easier way to make the font match, and allow you to choose the font rather than having to choose a font to match the Ž.

Although, if you wanted to, you could use an application that would accept the extended keyboard in whatever font you liked, then do a screen shot of it to have the font match. Yes, it's fiddly, and not a real honest-to-goodness solution, but doable, I would think, as long as you don't have a lot of them in the document.

In Appleworks you can create some caron characters by activating a Central European keyboard layout and making sure the font being used has a CE at the end of the name. For example, capital z- caron can be found in the Hungarian layout at Option Shiftd.

You activate these layouts via system prefs/international/input menu and then select them in the "flag" menu at the top right of the finder. Use Keyboard Viewer to see which key does what.