What is thisÉ Whenever I want an apostrophe I get an e with a thingy over it.
Question mark, Capital e with thingy.
I have no idea why this is happening, clearly I must have done something, unintentionally. I have no idea what and no clue as how to undo it.
For weeks Iève been writing my emails and posts very carefully to avoid question marks and apostrophes, but itès got to stop.
Ièm throwing myself at your mercy.
I have a macintosh g4 with os 10.2, jaguar, and I use internet explorer to browse. Both os and browser are recent upgrades for me so I am truly lost here.
The worst part is the sinking feeling that itès something very simply switched on and off, that like, everyone else knows about but me.
Since no one who actually knows has answered yet, I’d suggest that you may have changed your keyboard configuration accidentally. If you managed to switch to a non-English keylayout, you’ll get all them funny accenty characters they use over there in Yurp. Check your language or region or keyboard settings (I dunno how it works on Macintoshes) and make sure it’s set to a normal layout.
Does it appear on your screen as è? It may be that you have the program set up to replace the straight apostrophe ’ with a ‘proper’ apostrophe (e.g. ’, but I don’t know if that’ll show up right). If a setting is wrong (in some programs you have to select the character to replace the ’ with) or if you’re using a font that doesn’t have the ‘proper’ quotation marks, you may see another character in its place.
Excalibre is probably right though – it’s inserting an accented character. If you have a non-English keyboard setup, or even US International (that’s what it’s called in Windows, anyway), you may need to change your keyboard settings back to US English or whatever is correct. This would only be the case if apostrophes show up correctly in stuff other people have written, but not in stuff you write. If no apostrophes show up correctly, it may be a font issue.
It’s related to a conspiracy by the Québecois to make English-speaking Canucks sound weird over the internet; it was necessary because typing can’t convey the Canadian pronunciation of “about the house.”
You using my computer?.. On my Mac I have the flags, on my PC I toggle from a Canada French layout to U.S. English using Shift+Alt.
The keyboard layout for France French and Canada French are slightly different with respect to where the accents are to be found. So the flag represents the specific standard e.g./ Canada - ISO.
Apostrophes and question marks are still in the French Canada layout, just in different places (I think the apostrophe is Shift+comma and the quesiton mark is Shift+6).
The one I always forget is where the hell to find the @ in the French Canada layout. Shift+2 is the double quotation marks.
Your computer has been attacked by a virus from Canadian terrorist-hackers. You may notice that it sounds a little different when you reboot. Attorney General John Ashcroft has resigned his position so that he could devote all his time to ferreting out evil Canadian frostback terrorists. He calls it Operation Scarlet Eh?.
My guess: you may be Canadian but your keyboard isn’t. It’s not that Canadian keyboards don’t have apostrophes, it’s that the message they send to the computer when you type an apostrophe is different. Your keyboard is probably made in America (or made in Canada or elsewhere, but just made to the American standard).
Had this problem the other day trying to generate the euro € symbol.
Go to System Preferences => International. Choose ‘Input Menu’. In that, check the ‘Show input menu in menu bar’, as well as checking ‘Keyboard Viewer’. You can also turn on or off different nationalities.
When you quit out of that you should see the flag on the top menu. Click this and choose ‘Show Keyboard Viewer’. This will let you see exactly which characters will be generated by which keyboard combinations.
Note that the output shown by Keyboard Viewer is affected by which font is selected. Select the font you’re using to see exactly what you’ll get.
