Re: Yet another Shoebox question

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, J Matthew Pearson wrote:

> I'm having trouble with special characters.
These remarks assume you are using Windows.

I am not sure whether you are complaining about *typing* non-English
characters, or *viewing* them.  If the latter, it is a matter of font,
but all the basic Windows fonts handle them fine.

If you want to type non-English characters, you need a non-English keyboard,
which you set up using the Keyboard icon in the Control Panel.
Exactly how this works depends on exactly what flavor of Windows you
have, but you should choose the "Input Locales" tab if there is one,
and then select an appropriate locale.  In Windows 95, this has
to be different from the one you currently have, which is probably
U.S. English; IMHO British English is the right choice.  In Windows NT
(I don't know about Windows 98) you can choose U.S. English even though
you already have it available.

You then can choose a keyboard: you want "U.S. International".  Click
OK as many times as necessary.  You will probably need the Windows CD-ROM
for this.  A small [EN] icon will now appear at the left edge of your
system tray; clicking on this allows you to switch keyboards.

In the U.S. International keyboard, certain keyboard keys serve as modifiers;
you type them *before* the key to be modified.  The `, ', ", ^, and ~
keys do grave, acute, umlaut/diaeresis, circumflex, and tilde accents.
To get the actual character, type the modifier key followed by space.
The right-hand ALT key also becomes a special shift key, which can
provide things like ae-ligature (which is right-ALT-w).  AFAIK there is no handy
table of this, but trial and error works fairly well, as there is mostly
some logic to it: right-alt-C gives c-cedilla, and right-alt-$ gives
a pound sign.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
C'est la` pourtant que se livre le sens du dire, de ce que, s'y conjuguant
le nyania qui bruit des sexes en compagnie, il supplee a ce qu'entre eux,
de rapport nyait pas.               -- Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit"