Typing diacritics

[á, â, à å, ã, ä,]
Q: How do I type accents for foreign languages?
A: For languages using the roman alpahabet (French, German, Italian, Spanish, et. al.), follow the instructions below.
For non-roman character functionality, click here.

There are only two steps you need to take to start typing accents and diacritical marks on your computer.

  1. Configure your keyboard
  2. Use the proper keystrokes

Mac users can actually skip step 1. The keyboard input for diacritics is incorporated into the OS, although alternate international layouts are optional.

Windows users, after setting their keyboard IME to US-International, need to use slightly different keystrokes depending on whether they are typing into a word processor, or online, such as on a forum or weblog. Again, Mac users are exempt, and have only one key sequence to deal with.
 

1. Configuring the Windows keyboard
(step-by-step guides)
 
2. Keystrokes for:
Windows - MS Word
Windows - WWW
Mac
 
 
 

Another input option is the ALT key +ASCII number codes for those who don't want to use the U.S.-International keyboard.

For creating webpages, HTML has its own code for representing special characters. A good WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver will handle this for you, but it's useful for developers to be familiar with them.

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