I sometimes need to type an accented character like á. (I pasted that from Word.) I don’t see how to do that in Scrivener 3. In Word, it would be CTRL+single quote, a, but if I do that in Scrivener it unsplits the windows. What am I missing?
I don’t know if that can be achieved in Scrivener, but as a workaround, you might use the Windows shortcut to insert symbols knowing their code. To insert á you could just do
Alt + 0225
You keep Alt pressed and then compose the number 0225 with the keypad (yes, the leading 0 included). Et voilà.
It’s not easy to remember such codes, but if you use only few of them, might avoids you a roundtrip to Word and back.
Here is a list of some codes.
Matt
De temps en temps, j’écris en français.
From time to time, I write in French. For me, memorizing and utilizing Alt-codes was a constant flow-interrupter. But I found a solution that works great: The U.S. International keyboard. This is under Windows 10.
Once installed, you can activate the USI keyboard with a hot-key toggle. Left-Alt+Left-Shift is the default. You return to your default keyboard with the same hot-key toggle.
Once you’re in USI kbd mode, it’s almost the same as a regular US English kbd. Still QWERTY, and keys are all the same, except that a few keys are designated as escape keys. That is, pressing one of these keys doesn’t return a character value until you press another key after the escape key.
For example, the single quote key followed by “e” results in é. The single quote key followed by “c” results in ç. The “`” key (don’t know what it’s called) to the left of top-row “1” key followed by “a” results in à. And so on. To type the escape character itself, such as a single quote, you type the escape character followed by space.
As a generic keyboard, the USIk is independent of application. It works in Scrivener, Word, LibreOffice, Notepad, Textpad, whatever.
Once you get used to a slightly altered typing rhythm, it’s not bad at all. It is much more conducive to writing blocks of text than are single-character insertions. Even toggling into and out of USIk to type a single accented character is, for me, easier than reverting to Alt-codes.
Other French advantages include handling of non-English punctuation syntax, such as the unique French double-quote marks, followed and preceded by blanks, question marks preceded by blanks, etc.
I don’t know about punctuation facilities, but accented characters in other languages, such as umlauts and double-dots, are also handled by the USIk.
I’m away from my notes at the moment, but if anyone is interested, I’ll dig them up and post some links.
-Ken
Hugely useful, thanks. Except that USI isn’t listed in my Windows 10 - either my big desktop or laptop. I suspect I need an admin user.
Don’t know about admin privilege requirements, Marion, but you have to add the keyboard to your system. It wasn’t part of my systems to start with, either. It’s free, and it’s not a third-party add-on.
Google “us international keyboard pc” or “us international keyboard Windows 10.” You’ll find links to add, enable, etc. It takes some finagling to get it up and running, but has been well worth the trouble for me.
Attached is a table that I created, which shows the escape-key sequences and results of using the USIk.
Windows_InternationalKeyboard_French_v02a.zip (106.0 KB)
Thank you! It’s really buried deep, isn’t it? I eventually found it, with help from this link, and it works great!