Hi all,
I’ve been doing some checking around for my wife, we’ve been going around in circles with the special character map.
The problem is she was given MS works, not Word…apparently she was using one of a few limited trial runs with MS Word, now it’s locked her out of most any features worth using it for. Sure, we could buy it like Mr. Gates intended- but I have a feeling that with a little help, this option can be passed-over.
I ran into this special character applet, some guy had written, but I need the complete Spanish character set, or at least the characters exclusive to Spanish .
I’m trying to keep my solution as “free” as possible, but if it’s especially useful and not too expensive I guess I could see paying for it. … I’ve been playing around with the OS’s regional settings- but I shamefully must admit I don’t really know what I"m doing with it all.
To make matters worse this is referring to a laptop layout…so I’m doubley confused… I knew about the ALT + xxxx … but it doesn’t seem to wrok the same way when theres no NUM-PAD…
If you can help with the “laptop way of things” or can recommend a good (small and cheap) program that could help my wife with her Spanish studies, please be sure to leave me some clues on how to get to the ends I’m after… Thanks in advance!
Look for a file, I believe an .exe, called “CHARMAP” – it’s a character map table with “Upper ASCII” (the Alt-0239 type characters) displayed; you can select the font in question from a dropdown list. It has nearly all the Roman-alphabet foreign characters, such as ñ, é, à, ô available, and usable in any MS product and many others by copy-and-paste. On my Windows 98 machine it’s in Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools, but I’ve seen it in a bunch of places on various MS Windows OSes.
Most laptops have a number pad that can be accessed by holding down the Function key. So you can still do the Alt+num trick, you just have to hold down Alt and Function at the same time.
ÿñéÞö—> There, I just typed that on a laptop. It works
You need to activate the AltGR functions in Windows. Go to Control Panels->Regional and Language Options->Languages Tab->Details button->Add button, and then add United States International. The hit the Language Bar button, and ensure that Show the Language Bar on the desktop is checked. Now when your wife needs Spanish, select United States International from the language bar, and she can type ~n for ñ, and 'e for é, and 'a for á, &tc. But keep the regular US handy for non-Spanish typing, because Windows is pretty stupid and messes up all the time (I prefer the Mac method, but I’m not always in front of a Mac, unfortunately).
…So close, and yet so far away … IDDI¨´Id´jcs jck¨SJVCkl´dxaZ Vjhikdxzó … WOOhooo… ok, so my hero, Balthisar… now err, can you tell me how I¨m doing all this ? LOL… cuz, the keys have been ¨internationalized¨ now, so the placement and combinations are all ¨foreign¨ (pun intended) to say the least… :dubious: … I’ll be famous the world over… “the first man to ask for a map” haha… thanks in advance
Hmmm… if you’ve select US Internation, all of the keys should still be the same. It’s only the quotes and tilde that get messed up, plus if you hold right-alt with another key you get extra characters. Shouldn’t be any problem with the normal keys. On the other hand, I only know this trick on XP (thanks to the SDMB!), and have no idea how it behaves on other systems. What ’ you using?
What I do is convince my keyboards that they are bilingual.
Go to Control Panel.
Regional and Language Options.
Languages tab.
Details button.
The real keyboard will be selected; click on Add and choose “Spanish - International Sort”
Now you can cycle through the keyboards by using shift+alt, or using the little language sign in the greybar. ñ is directly to the right of l (so the key that claims to be the semicolon), ´ is in the ’ key, and ¨ is shift+’
To obtain á é ü, etc., just do the ´ or ¨ first and then the letter.
The , and . keys are in their usual spots, but now the ; is the shift of the , key and the : is the shift of the . key
haha… thanks in advance