How can I set up my computer to type a lot of material in grammatically correct Spanish?

February 4, 2004 10:24 AM

So, I want to type in Spanish [More]

The deal is, I'm soon going to have to type up quite a lot of material in Spanish. It needs to be grammatically correct; punctuation, accent marks, etc. What I'm looking for is a program (or just a good way) to do it, that's fast and doesn't involve rebinding dozens of strange keystrokes.

posted by Yelling At Nothing to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Is it worth your while to get a Spanish language keyboard and activate Spanish in word?
posted by biffa at 10:30 AM on February 4, 2004

I have an English keyboard but write most of my documents in Spanish.
I have it set up so I can switch bakc and forth with shift+alt (in XP's control panel/regional and language options/language tab/details), and use the " ' " key for accents & the ";" key for ñ.
I also have English & Spanish dictionaries in Word and Mozilla. Works fine.
posted by signal at 10:45 AM on February 4, 2004

if you do what signal suggests note that at login you can switch between keyboard layouts with alt-shift. this is critical if your password has characters that change place depending on the keyboard (bitter experience talking here).
posted by andrew cooke at 7:08 PM on February 4, 2004

If you're using Word, you can use its built in key combinations. What you do is press Ctrl + the keyboard character resembling the mark you want to add, then let go of both and press the letter.

So to get an 'é', you type "Ctrl+', e". To get an 'ñ', you type "Ctrl+Shift+~, n". "Ctrl+Shift+:, u" nets you a 'ü'.

To get upside down punctuation, press "Ctrl+Alt+Shift+?" or "Ctrl+Alt+Shift+!".
posted by Khalad at 11:52 PM on February 4, 2004