Hotkeys for special characters in a document created in Google Drive.

April 3, 2013 7:24 PM

It's got to be easy, right? Using Google Drive to create documents;need to write in Italian and English. There must be an easier way to enter latin characters à è ì etc than going through the insert>special characters>drop down menu. It indicates that I can set up a hotkey with U+ but to no avail. I'm on a Mac
posted by Flashduck to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

option + ` and then the vowel. This works in general on the Mac and works in Google Drive (I just tested it).

You also get á with option + e then the vowel, ä with option + u then the vowel, and ê with option + i then the vowel.
posted by hoyland at 7:43 PM on April 3, 2013

On the Mac, the easiest way is to learn the Mac native ways of typing these characters. For the ones in your question, hit option ~ followed by the vowel you want it over. (You may notice that the ~ key also has a back tick on it to help you remember) If you want it to go the other way, option e followed by the vowel.
posted by advicepig at 7:44 PM on April 3, 2013

(I keep saying 'vowel', but ñ works the same way (it's option+n).)
posted by hoyland at 7:45 PM on April 3, 2013

You can use the same methods you'd use in pretty much any Mac application. These include:

1. Using an appropriate keyboard layout. Go to the international preferences (on 10.7, that's System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Input Sources) and enable the Italian keyboard layout. You then have easy access to Italian characters, and can switch between English and Italian layouts.

2. Use dead keys to specify accents. You can do this with the US English keyboard layout that you're probably already using, you just have to learn the appropriate key combinations. For "à" it's Option-`, followed by A.
posted by vasi at 7:45 PM on April 3, 2013

You also might find this useful.

http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codemac.html
posted by advicepig at 7:47 PM on April 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

If you're running Lion+, you can hold down the a (or e or i or others) key to get a popup list of special characters you can insert, and you can either select the character you want with the mouse or type the number that appears under the character. More info here.
posted by jcrbuzz at 5:41 PM on April 4, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for your quick responses!

I feel like a dork, although the switch from PC to Mac is taking a little longer in some things than others! Thanks!
posted by Flashduck at 7:58 PM on April 13, 2013