MS Word ( was Re: Using Diacritics)

>Hmm.  I've never worked with Word, but am about to. I hate to think I'm
>going to have to learn new key-strokes...
Well, I b*tched and screamed when I had to abandon Wordperfect in 1994 as I
not only knew Wordperfect and had written macros to deal with Kana but also
thought it a much better tool. Also, in Wordperfect, for hardcopy, I could
create any combination I wanted via indicating it as an over-punch/-print.
Still, I had to switch to Word, and finally adapted to some of it's
excentricities.

>Another way to get all these standard accented characters is to set your
>keyboard to US International, which makes `/~, ^, and '/" into dead keys--
>you type e.g. (single quote)+a  and get á; (shift quote)+a > ä.  (Of
>course, if you actaully want 'or "", you have to hit quote=spacebar).  The
>same range of characters, and others, is available by using (SHIFT) RIGHT
>ALT +
>various keys-- RIGHT ALT + t gives þ. Shift-Alt-t gives Þ
You can set WIN-XP to allow you ton use different national keyboards in Word
and other apps (mine is set to allow me to use German, Spanish, French,
Icelandic, Finnish), though you also must be careful to reset the AUTODETECT
option to "no" each and every time you add or select a new language keboard
in WIN-XP if you every do mixed texts in a single document (e.g. French and
Finnish) or have a conlang with any characters WIN can i.d. as being in a
natlang. If you don't, WIN-XP resets autodetect to "yes". When I forget to
do this, I end up being annoyed by suddenly finding that my keyboard has
auto-switched to a German or Spanish one.

Supposedly, you also can create and remap a keyboard (haven't done this
myself, do not know how quirkly it may be).

>This new computer, which I'm still figuring it out (XP and some kind of
>Office Write program), has a goodly amount of Unicode available thru
>Insert - Special Characters; that brings up a map of everything
>available in the given font, which you can then insert.  It also, very
>kindly, gives the Unicode number of the selected character. There must be a
>way to put unusual diacritics on letters, but I
>haven't found it.  The fonts do contain many precomposed things, like
>vowel+macron or breve, ogonek, accented consonants etc.  Lots of Cyrillic
>stuff too, which I don't use.........plus
>Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and phonetic.
I do not know your situation, but you may want to peruse HELP under Word,
searching for UNICODE or INTERNATIONAL. Full true 100% unicode does not
appear to be the default in WIN-XP (or so HELPS says), though supposedly you
can select that through a series of screens. There is a caveat that your
system will run slower etc. if you elect to use unicode.

>There doesn't seem to be a way to insert special characters in
>Notepad....if there is, someone please tell me how!! (Keep in mind that I'm
>near-illiterate computerwise, especially w.r.t. my
>new system)
Other than switching to a pre-defined font, there isn't in Notepad, but I
tried Wordpad, and it does recognize the alt/ctl-key strokes and allow
insertions (no promises on what happens when you save that document,
though).

>Compared to what was available on my old Win98/Corel WP8 system, it's
>flabbergasting.
Yes, I find especially annoying all the auto "help" features.


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