Hotkey Special Characters

[Sparrowhawk]

I tried posting this in the Technical Support forum a few days ago, but it seems to have been ignored, so posting it here:

@Sparrowhawk

So I started my Scrivener days on Mac, but I have been migrating more and more to PC. The Windows team has done a great job, and the transition has been nigh painless. However, there is a MacOS feature that I miss terribly, and I can get around it in Word, but I’m not sure how to do so in Scrivener.

I need to be able to use special characters without having to type out an alt code. And not just because it’s a huge waste of time and hard to remember, but also because I do most of my writing on a laptop that doesn’t have a numpad. On Mac, it was just a matter of holding down the vowel (I almost never used characters on consonants), but those days are gone.

In Word I can hotkey special characters like ä. Can Scrivener do this as well? How do I access it?

Also, can the Beta / will Scriv 3 be able to do this? And if so, how?

-Eric

[legacy_rdale]

I’m still amazed that Windows doesn’t have a better built-in method for accents. I mean, why not offer an option to just press-and-hold a key to get a pop-up of choices the way mobile virtual keyboards (and Mac OS) works?

I did a little digging once, and there are third-party utilities that make accented characters easier to enter. Here’s a link with a few options (scroll to the bottom): superuser.com/questions/110605/ … in-windows

[Sparrowhawk]

@rdale

I’m still amazed that Windows doesn’t have a better built-in method for accents. I mean, why not offer an option to just press-and-hold a key to get a pop-up of choices the way mobile virtual keyboards (and Mac OS) works?

I did a little digging once, and there are third-party utilities that make accented characters easier to enter. Here’s a link with a few options (scroll to the bottom): superuser.com/questions/110605/ … in-windows

Thanks! I read on the forum about WinCompose and it seems to be doing the trick and works in Scrivener. Still not as nice as MacOS’s just hold the vowel down solution, but at least I can now type wheat I need on my laptop!

[DavidR]

You can set up substitutions to do this. E.g., I have a\ set up to become à.

[jljovano]

If you miss french accents, you can install this
users.sfr.be/denis.liegeois/kbdfrac.htm
and get É œ Ç æ Æ etc., all with altgr+key