How do I write diaeresis on Lap Top Dell ?

[monikah]

I have to write German Text. My Lap Top DELL Inspiron does not have the
option for diaeresis. How can I tipe them anyway?

 

[StevenM]

Actually, one cannot just add a diaeresis to a character (= letter), rather
Unicode & the Extended ASCII has various characters with a diaeresis already
on them. One way to handle this in Word is to simply insert the character
with Insert -> Symbol.

It is possible to have a short cut which will help you type as diaeresis,
such as Ctrl + Shift + “:†followed by a vowel might work (it worked for me).
But what the shortcut is doing is substituting the appropriate character.

There are also other way to accomplish this. You might find a keyboard
management utility. I use Keyman to type in ancient Greek.

Once the substitution has been made, you can cut and paste without fear of
loosing the diaeresis because it is actually fixed to the character.

Steven Craig Miller

 

[Barbara]

Assuming that you are asking how to insert vowels with umlauts over them,
they are available through Insert > Symbol, shortly after all the standard
English alphabetic characters. This will be somewhat annoying if you need to
do it a lot. You might want to define some macros with keyboard shortcuts to
carry out these insertions.

You will probably want to tell Word that the document is German, so that the
spell-checker can do something useful. In versions through Word 2003, the
setting is under Tools > Language > Set Language.

You can also change the settings in the Windows Control Panel for Regional
and Language options (see, especially, the Languages tab). But unless your
keyboard really is mapped to the German characters, changing the setting for
keyboard probably cause you a lot of confusion.

 

[StevenM]

For what it might be worth, ... Robert Bringhurst writes: "Linguists
distingish between the 'umlaut', which marks a change in pronunciation of a
single vowel (as in the German Schön) and the 'diaeresis', which marks the
separation of adjacent vowels (as in naïve and Noël). The typographic symbol
is the same ..." ("The Elements of Typographic Style," page 276).

Frankly I wasn't aware of the distinction until your comment made me curious
enough to look it up.

Steven Craig Miller

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Further, in the same way that produces a smiley face in Word, the colon
) subs for the diaeresis/umlaut in keyboard shortcuts. So, for example,
the shortcut for ä is Ctrl+colon, a (Ctrl+:, a or Ctrl+Shift+;, a). See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/InsertSpecChars.htm for more.

 

[grammatim]

The keyboard shortcut for the German vowels on the ordinary English
keyboard with ordinary American Word is Ctrl-Shift-: [colon] followed
by the vowel (type a, o, u, A, O, U).

You'll also need the Ess-Tset (double-s) character, which is Ctrl-
Shift-& [ampersand], s.