a thing i am tired of being frustrated by

[fox]

So okay. On the computer I was using in college - a Mac II-something, bless its heart - the word processing program I used, which was probably Microsoft Works (anyone remember that)? made it much easier than I think it is now to get the basic western European diacritics: with the command or apple key and a, e, i, u, c, or n, you could apply a grave accent, acute accent, circumflex, umlaut, cedilla, or tilde to the next letter you typed, whatever it was. (So command-e followed by e gave you é.) (I assume there were easy ways to get the macron, the slash through the o, the circle on top of the a, the ogonek, and the hacek, as well, but I didn't need those then.)

Now, I can't do any of this. In Word and even in its clones, I have to go to "insert" and then "symbol" and then scroll all around until I find the letter I want with the diacritic I want on it. But I feel like there must be something I'm missing. Someone, please tell me: are there keystrokes for (combining) ´, ̀, ˆ, ¨, ¸ ˜, ̌, ̨, etc.?

Comments

[snakeling]

Hi, here via the network.

It doesn't really depends on Word, but on what flavour of Windows you're using, with what kind of keyboard. If you're using the basic US keyboard, setting up accented characters is possible, but a pain as you have to do every single character by hand. You can change your keyboard to something that'll give you pre-set shortcuts, though.

Depending on what Windows you're using, I may be able to help you set that up.

[fox]

At work it's Windows XP Pro and you'd be my favorite complete stranger ever.

(At home it's Mac OS X and maybe that's not your department.)

[snakeling]

(Neither is, actually, as I'm a Linux girl, but I can have access to a Windows computer more easily.)

XP's easy, I don't even have to type the tutorial ;)

You might wish to print the keyboard layout.

Let me know if you can't work it out :)