Thè jóy öf áçcênts

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

If you ever refer to foreign words or names, you’ll know the trauma of typing accented characters on a UK keyboard. Microsoft Word has its own system – for example, to type an “é” character you can press Ctrl-’ followed by the letter “e”. But what if you’re not using Word? What if you’re writing an email, or a batch file, or – shock horror – a blog post?

The traditional way to type characters that aren’t on your keyboard is to hold down Alt and type in the extended ASCII character code on the numeric keypad; so to get “é” you’d hold down Alt and type 130. That still works, even in Windows 7, but the codes aren’t exactly convenient to type, nor easy to remember – especially since they’re in a completely illogical order (check it out). (more…)