How to easily produce special written characters (specifically European ones)?

April 8, 2004 2:00 AM

I'm an american, but I communicate in an online game with europeans... I'm the token stateside resident in our in-game organization. I do know a few words from each of their languages, but what I don't know is how to produce some of the special charachters that make up those languages with my standard american keyboard. For instance, in discussing the local name for easter with a swedish friend, Påskdagen, she can produce the odd charachter easily, while I can't even figure out how to do it besides copying and pasting from my charachter map in Word. Any ideas?
posted by SpecialK to Writing & Language (16 answers total)

If you open up Charmap (you can do this from the 'Run' dialog in the Start menu) and find that character, you may find that it also has an 'Alt + xxx' number combination associated to it, so whenever you want to type that character you just hold down 'Alt' and type in those three numbers. This shortcut saved me an enormous amount of time when I was doing my French homework on an English keyboard.

(The reason I can't look this up for you is because I've moved over to a Mac...)
posted by adrianhon at 2:11 AM on April 8, 2004

Please note that, IIRC, you need to type the number with the numeric keypad. At least, that was the way of it dating back in DOS 5.0, and I've no reason to believe it has changed since.
posted by Ryvar at 3:08 AM on April 8, 2004

I suppose it was rather lazy of me not to test that before posting (I JUST rolled out of bed, though)- yes, that's still the way of it.
posted by Ryvar at 3:09 AM on April 8, 2004

Alt+0229. Lazy bastards.

Hold down alt, key 0, 2, 2, 9 on your numeric keypad, and voilå.
posted by armoured-ant at 3:26 AM on April 8, 2004

å
posted by seanyboy at 3:32 AM on April 8, 2004

Also, in Norwegian (not sure if it holds true for Swedish, probably does) the å sound is also represented as aa.

So Påske, the word for Easter, can also be written as Paaske.
posted by annathea at 5:18 AM on April 8, 2004

(not sure if it holds true for Swedish, probably does)

Nope, it doesn't. We use å, ä and ö all the way, baby! :)
posted by soundofsuburbia at 5:27 AM on April 8, 2004

Switch to Macintosh and simply type Option-a anywhere.
posted by joeclark at 6:04 AM on April 8, 2004

specialk - if you find a list of HTML character codes it might be helpful. most of them have both an easy-to-remember code for web pages (ie, þ for þ) but they usually also have a listing like þ that will give you the same character in HTML. replace the "&" with [alt] and the (# with 0 to make it 4 digits, if necessary) when typing it into a text box. that saves you the trouble of opening word or such to find the character mapping, if you just bookmark or print out a copy of a site that has a good HTML special character listing.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:38 AM on April 8, 2004

damn. looked fine on preview but posting converted the char mapping into actual HTML. should be "& thorn;" (no space) for the easy-to-remember char code and "& # 254;" (no spaces) for the corresponding numeric code. sorry.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:40 AM on April 8, 2004

special characters. Would this work?
posted by emoeby at 7:48 AM on April 8, 2004

seriously, it makes me sad when windows people have to do all this alt-0245 mumbo jumbo, look how you do it on a mac. It's almost like they thought you might have this need at some point!
posted by rhyax at 9:03 AM on April 8, 2004

you can also add extra keyboard definitions (this is windows, right?). presumably via control panel -> keyboard (typing on a linux box at the moment). if you add the appropriate national keyboard then you'll get different keys doing different things. in general this is simply frustrating, but if you happen to know what the national keyboard layout is (in my case, the spanish one) then you can type on your (usa-english?) keyboard without looking at the keys, and see the result as if typing at the "foreign" keyboard.

does that make sense? also, remember that alt left-shift swaps between keyboard maps (useful if you need to login and have the wrong keyboard...)
posted by andrew cooke at 10:09 AM on April 8, 2004

oh, and the current keyboard map thing is shown in the system tray (that blue square).
posted by andrew cooke at 10:10 AM on April 8, 2004

You can also set your keyboard layout to United States (International), which lets you make those letters with a combination of [Right Alt]+[KEY] codes. It takes a little while to get used to though, because it will also put diereses (umlauts) over vowels after a quotation mark, so if you start a quotation with a vowel you have to press space between the quotation mark and the vowel.
posted by stopgap at 11:22 AM on April 8, 2004

Another HTML character entities list. Might come in handy.
posted by me3dia at 12:38 PM on April 8, 2004