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Tips about French

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For PC users:

There are several ways to type French accents on an American keyboard.

Some people use the insert symbol command. It's a quite useful command when you want to insert symbol rarely used, but when we deal with accents in French "rarely used" is not a very adequate expression.

Some other people set the apostrophe key in a way that it prints an accent on the following key that is being typed. First of all I don't know how to do it, and I never learned because when one wants to type a real apostrophe things get quite complicated.

The way I type my accents may appear pretty user-unfriendly at first, but with a little experience it's the best way I know. It consists of using the ASCII codes, that is some numbers that are associated with every character your computer can print on the screen. On most of PC software with you press the 'ALT' key and then the ASCII number with the 'ALT' key still pressed, you can get the character you want.

The following chart shows all the ASCII codes for the French accents and special characters:

For Mac users:
(provided by Andrew Jung)

In order to type French Accents on a Macintosh, there is a good article on Apple's Knowledge base.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=34575

 

As you can see a pattern is seen. For an Accent Grave option-` is typed, Accent Acute = option-e, Accent Circumflex = option-i, and so on. This is followed by the character that can take the accent.

So it is easy that once you know that option-e will give you an acute accent you just follow it with the letter you want to have the accent and likewise for the others. You are basically building the character, first the accent and then the letter (with the exception of the cedilla, but that is easy enough to remember (option-c). There are many other combinations as well such as "option-n" for the "Tilde accent ~" and option-1 (Á) and option-shift-? (À).

One other note. If you want just the accent by itself, type the accent combination twice, such as "option-e option-e" for an accent Acute by itself without a letter. (This doesn't work for the cedilla though.)

They can find out more by either using the Key Caps application found in the Apple menu for Mac OS 9 and below and for Mac OS 10 to 10.2 in the Utilities folder. For Mac OS 10.3 it there is the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer found in the Input menu that is access through the International System Preferences.