Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Typing Accents


 

I was working on reformatting my résumé a little bit today, and I wanted to change my MSN IM tag to reflect the fact. So I set it to "Resume" and went off to work. Of course, all that did was draw a smartass remark from Ian about me powering my brain back up after suspending it. :)

 

While we were chatting, I finally remembered the key sequence that would have let me type "résumé" instead of "resume". It's control-' followed by e. Similarly, control-` followed by a letter renders the other accent (although not for all letters). And control-~ a gives ã.

 

Two interesting things about this:


  1. Ian's keyboard gave reversed accents from mine for the same key sequences. But he's in the UK - maybe this has something to do with driving on the wrong side of the road. :)

  2. These key sequences don't work in all text controls. So far, from what I've tested, it works in Word and in MSN IM, but not in notepad, notepad2, nor InfoPath.

 

At any rate, I'm sure I could have found this on Google, but now I know where to look. Also, hopefully blogging this will remind me to make sure I put support for it into my TextEditor control.
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8 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 24, 2005 at 5:22 AM

    Neat. Thanks for giving me some useful info that I can now search for & find a little easier.



    FWIW, wordpad supports it, too. Maybe the generic RTF control does? Have to check.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 24, 2005 at 5:27 AM

    Wow, that's significantly easier than my method: ALT+0233



    Having tried your technique a bit now, though, I think the ALT way works more reliably.

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  3. AnonymousAugust 24, 2005 at 5:34 AM

    Probably it does, since I'm guessing it's more baked-in than this way. This way seems to depend on the control implementing it. I think ALT-xxx is a Windowsism.

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  4. AnonymousAugust 24, 2005 at 7:34 AM

    I tried going out for a drive on the wrong side of the road (i.e. the right-hand side) to see if that changed anything.



    And while I now have some exciting new endorsements on my licence, my keyboard still seems to have in the same way...

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  5. AnonymousAugust 24, 2005 at 9:52 AM

    You have to respect a man who will do so much in the name of science.

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  6. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2005 at 5:10 AM

    There's a handy French & Spanish accented-character cheat-sheet over at http://teacher.mvschool.com/~redmm/accents.htm. It has the shortcuts for inverted exclam and question mark as well (ctrl-alt-shift-1 and ctrl-alt-shift-/, respectively).

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  7. AnonymousSeptember 28, 2005 at 5:24 AM

    FYI, the accent direcection seems to depend on which one you choose... IE, if you hit the single quote, you get one, if you hit the accent mark (top left key on an american keyboard) you get the other direction.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousSeptember 28, 2005 at 5:40 AM

    Right. Like it says in the post. :p

    ReplyDelete

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