How do you type words with accents like German or Japanese ?
Hi.
This has nothing to do with Scrivener.
It is a language/keyboard setting in the OS itself.
Under Windows, I use Canadian Multi-Language Standard.
It wraps English and French in a single keyboard layout.
à ç Ă© Ăš Ăč ĂȘ Ă« ö ĂŽ Ăą ĂŒ Ăź
Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă Ă
If you only need a few of those occasionally and donât want to learn a new keyboard layout, fetch them from the character map. (I donât know where it is for Mac though.)
You can copy those above to a dedicated document in your project and copy/paste them whenever.
To apply the accents on Mac, hold down the key for the letter you want to add an accent to and a popup menu will appear above the letter for you to choose an accent from.
Thanks for responding. But I use OS and I canât find the item under Windows.
Cheers.
Thanks. But I pressed and held down the keys for several seconds and noting happened.
The accent shortcut is actually a function of your Mac operating system and not Scrivener itself, so you might need to enable it there by making a change using your Terminal.app on your Mac.
To do that, copy this snippet of code:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true
Navigate to Terminal by going to Applications âž Utilities âž Terminal. Double click on it to open it. You will see a small amount of text there. Paste the snippet of code in immediately after the current text and hit Enter. Shut down your computer for the command to take into effect.
Reboot your Mac, reopen Scrivener, and now, try holding down a key and see if the diacritics/accents window pops up.
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Another solution (which I use) is to set your mac keyboard to US International through the system settings for keyboard. This will then allow you to type 'a which will give you ĂĄ or "u which will become ĂŒ; ~n ñ; ~a ĂŁ etc. I have no idea about Japanese.
But as all the others have said this is a question of the operating system. You can test if it is working in any text editor on the Mac. The advantage is that the keyboard layout does not change, but you can type accented or diacritics in an intuitive way without taking your hands off the keyboard.
I hope this helps.
It really depends on your keyboard layout, how to do this precisely, but itâs worth noting that the default out of the box US-English keyboard has full support for all European markings, you donât have to customise anything, just need to learn how to use it.
The best way to do that, in my opinion, is to enable the Keyboard Viewer utility, which is a good learning tool and easy to turn on and off as needed until you get the basics memorised:
- Go into System Settings, and at the top of the sidebar, search for âkeyboard viewerâ.
- Youâll see a search result for something like, âShow keyboard and emojiâŠâ, click that.
- At the top of this dialogue, enable, Show Input menu in menu bar.
- This will add an icon that will give you quick access to this utility.
Now with that open, hold down the Option key on your keyboard and note the five or so keys highlighted in orange. Each of those corresponds to a symbol that can be combined with a letter. To use them you need only press, for example, â„E to enable ÂŽ, which will appear differently in your text editor than a normal character, itâs waiting for you to supply the letter to mark with that diacritic, like âaâ. Once you do that, youâll get ĂĄ. So really only need to learn that small handful of punctuation modifiers to accent many dozens of letters, and most of them are somewhat mnemonic in that they are attached to letters most often associated with the symbol, or are similar to it, like Ăž being on o. Once you get familiar with them, it will be little different than using the Shift key to capitalise letters, and be quite efficient for typing.
Also note that Option-Shift will access a second layer of special symbols in Keyboard Viewer. You might for example need to access the ⏠symbol now and then, and so knowing thatâs â§â„2 is handy (at least on US-EN).
Now Japaneseâthatâs a whole different universe of character input. CJK scripts in general tend to have a secondary interface that pops up while you type, that helps you create compound characters from multiple keystrokesâand thatâs not going to be something you can do with the Option key, or any keyboard layout that focuses on the extended Latin character system. Youâll need to learn how to add keyboard layouts and switch between them on the fly. Youâd best search the web for a tutorial or two on Mac input for that, because it would take a lot to brute force your way into learning it, I think, even with Keyboard Viewer to help.
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