If you’ve ever needed to enter international characters like the é in café, then you’ve probably like me either used the Character Map utility or memorized the letter’s Alt + numeric keypad number combination.
The problem is this is a real pain if you have to type these letters more than once in a blue moon, especially if you have a laptop without a numeric keypad!
Well it turns out there’s an easy (and painless) solution for that works for all versions of Windows.
It lets you type accented characters, by first pressing the key that looks like the accent ` and then the letter e to get the accented version è.
Configuration
I’m only going to go though the steps for configuring Windows XP below, however in other versions of windows the steps are similar.
- Control Panel
- Regional & Language Options
- Languages (tab)
- Details… (under Text Services & Input Languages)
- Click Add
- Leave the language the same (should be whatever was on the previous screen, in my case English (New Zealand))
- For the Keyboard Layout, choose United States – International
- Click OK on all three dialogs, and you’re done
You should now have a little keyboard icon (
) on the taskbar down by the System Tray/Clock.
To enable International character support for the application you’re currently working in, click on this icon and choose United States – International. This setting is per application, if you’d like it on all the time, you can set it as the default from the Regional & Language Options control panel.
Inputting Accented Characters
The accents are available by typing the following keys, plus the letter in question:
| circumflex | Shift+6 |
| grave | ` (above the TAB key) |
| acute | ‘ (single quote mark) |
| le tréma | “ (double quote mark) |
| cedilla | ‘ (single quote mark) |
With this keyboard layout if you want to enter one of the accent keys verbatim, you’d enter the key and then press the spacebar. E.g. to type ‘ed, you’d type:
‘ space e d
Symbol Character Support
This keyboard layout also changes the right-ALT key into a special character key (the left-ALT functions normal).
Holding down the right-ALT and pressing the keys shown in the left column gives you the character on the right:
| right ALT + / | ¿ (spanish punctuation) |
| right ALT + 1 | ¡ (spanish punctuation) |
| right ALT + c | © (copyright) |
| right ALT + C | ¢ (cents) |
| right ALT + – | ¥ (yen) |
| right ALT + $ | £ (pound) |
| right ALT + 5 | € (euro) |
| right ALT + 6 | ¼ |
| right ALT + 7 | ½ |
| right ALT + 8 | ¾ |
| right ALT + = | x |
| right ALT + + | / |
| right ALT + ; | ¶ (paragraph) |
| right ALT + : | ° (degrees) |
| right ALT + W | Å |
| right ALT + w | å |
| right ALT + Z | Æ |
| right ALT + z | æ |