Typophile

Accents / French keyboard

Luke0 votes

Hello there,

I was under the impression that short-cuts to accents were keyboard dependant, but a french friend i'm helping out is having problems...

At this time there is just 2 tiny problems : (it's hard to explain, it's a very specific french rule). I need this : â ê ô î û - when I use first ^ and then the A (^+A) it works only for the cap the "ô" works only when I use alt+^ , and I really prefer ^+o ? and If it's possible I need the same combination for ä ë ï ö ü : MAJ+^+A, etc. can I have the "" when I use directly the " and " one the keyboard, not alt+" and alt+" ?

does that make sense to anyone? all the glyphs exist and I can't for the life of me work out what's wrong... help!

Michel Boyer0 votes

What is described above looks like the behavior of the US-extended keyboard on the Macintosh. Here is a grab of the keyboard viewer when the alt key is down:

The keys in orange are "dead keys"; when you type them, you choose your accent, and after that you type the letter to put it on. To get ô, you thus type "alt 6" (and there may be a ˆ or not displayed on top of the 6 on the physical keyboard) and then you type "o".

To change the behavior of the keyboard, you go in "system preferences" > "International" > "Input menu" and select the keyboard you want. "French" will select an azerty keyboard, "Canadian French" a variation of qwerty. Also select "Show input menu in menu bar" so that you can switch rapidly between keyboards if you use more than one, and also be able to select conveniently "Show keyboard viewer" (whose grab is above when the Alt key is pressed while using the US-extended keyboard). If none of the predefined keyboards pleases you, you can build yourself your own using Ukelele, the Mac OS X Keyboard Layout Editor from SIL.

Michel

twardoch0 votes

And that of course all presupposes that Dux’s friend is using Mac OS X. On Windows, it’s yet different (which is why it is a good idea to tell us which operating system you are using when posting here).

Cheers,
Adam

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