Foreign accents

[Bernie Marquardt]

Hi there. I am always amazed at the ways of making accents in text.
type in several languages and over the years I got used to using fo
instance alt+130 (on the numeric keyboard) to render an é, or alt+16
to render a ñ. Now if I invoke the function in Microsoft Word to inser
a symbol, it has other numbers to do the same thing, like alt+0233 fo
the é and alt+0241 for the ñ. (Notice the added 0). Both systems work
And I a believe in Word 2007, there are even additional methods to d
this. Why isn't there a standard way? Will the old method (the one I a
used to) be phased out

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There are indeed numerous ways, including built-in keyboard shortcuts just
for Word; see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/InsertSpecChars.htm.
Different strokes for different folks. I believe the Alt+00x and Alt+000x
shortcuts work only for ASCII character numbers; for Unicode numbers, you
have to use Alt+X or another shortcut.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Bernie,

You're stepping into a quagmire here.

Computers use "code pages" to translate between numbers (which is really all
they use internally) and the characters -- technically, the "glyphs" or
pictures of characters -- that appear on the screen.

The numbers you're used to are defined by code page 437, the IBM PC or
MS-DOS code page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437). While this is
older than Windows and isn't used much by current software, I doubt that any
manufacturer intends to completely remove support for it.

The numbers with the 0 prefix are from the Windows 1252 code page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252), which is pretty much standard
for Western languages. This code page has a different order for the letters
outside the basic alphabet, and the drawing characters are replaced with
more accented letters.

There are indeed other ways
(http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/InsertSpecChars.htm): In recent versions
of Word you can type the Unicode number directly into the text and then
press Alt+X; some symbols have default shortcuts; and there's a Symbols
dialog to let you click a picture of the one you want.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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[Bernie Marquardt]

Thank you, Jay and Suzanne, for your input. You both gave me a lot o
information to work with. That was quite instructive. I'll be sure an
come back to this forum about Word. For years I have used Word from M
Office XP standard, but I am trying to get used to Word 2007, which i
quite complex in comparison.
Berni