OK, so in a fit of madness I volunteered to transcribe a song for my Czech professor. I knew how to produce vowels with accent marks, so I figured the other diacritics wouldn’t pose much of a problem. Wrong. I’ve tried everything from resetting the language settings on the keyboard, to cutting and pasting from Czech web pages. Word doesn’t seem to have any symbols for about half a dozen characters, and they just show up as blank boxes when I try to paste them in. Short of writing the marks in by hand (which probably won’t work since she wants to put this on a web page) is there anything I can do?
I’ve always gotten it to type in Slovak by clicking on the “Tools” button, clicking on “Language” and then choosing Slovak. Czech is also a choice, I’m guessing that this should work for you.
If it doesn’t, try entering the letters as symbols from the ASCII table. This is slow and tedious, but is should work.
I suspect you’ll need your Windows installation disk for this.
I’m still not sure how easy it’ll be to actually type all these characters, you may need to change your keyboard setup to Czech, under Start-Settings-Control Panel-Keyboard. However, until you learn where each of the less common characters are now, this may really screw up your ability to type.
Another option is to cut and paste each character from the website you gave. In my version of Word 97, at least, I have no problem pasting them; not sure why you’re unable with the Czech pages you’ve tried. Anyway, once you have multilanguage support installed, you can go to this page to see the code for each character. In your browser, click View-Character Set-Central European, or View-Codification-Central European, or something similar. The chart is now mislabelled, but includes all your characters.
Now, having installed your multilanguage support, and switched to Czech for your Word document (Hopefully they’ll tell you how to do that): Rather than using a Czech keyboard setup, where you really don’t know where your d’ symbol is, you can stick to the US setup. Refer to the chart on the webpage I gave and see that typing Alt-0239 produces the desired effect. Always hold the Alt key down, and type the number in on your keypad preceded by a 0.
This has been a bit long-winded, but it’s really not tough at all (although I’ll admit I haven’t installed multilanguage support).
I should’ve read your post more carefully. Thanks to Punkyova I see how the language selection works in Word. You should be able to do exactly what he/she once multilanguage support is installed.
Since the end goal is a webpage, you’ll need to be sure that when you transfer from Word to the webpage, it retains the Central European designation. I assume that it does this automatically, but always czech (sorry).
This also opens up another way to produce your webpage, even if you are unable to install multilanguage support for some reason. If you can type the document with the Western character set, e.g. using ï rather than d’, it should still work just fine. Merely add “charset=iso-8859-2” to the source code for that page or section, and the browser will know to display that Alt-0239 in the Cenrtral European rather than Western European character set. This is exactly what your Czech alphabet page did. Typing the document this way may be maddening, and I’d suggest installing multilanguage support if possible.
I realise the reply to this query is a wee bit late to be of any use to the poster, but thought it might help someone else.
The only thing I can think of is the font in your document is not the right one to work with the Czech alphabet. I’m using MS Word 2003 and copied a couple of letters from the alphabet in your link and pasted them into my word document (Font is Times New Roman) and they worked fine. Try using a really common font like Arial, or Myriad Pro or Times and it may work?
(Sadly, I’ve also forgotten pretty much all of the Czech I learned in that class.)