Parlez-vous Macintosh? Tips on getting the right accents

Parlez-vous Macintosh? Tips on getting the right accents



Author: Janet Spinas-Cunningham

Date: May, 1989

Keywords: DTP desktop publishing hints writing keyboard word processing

Text:
One of the best features of the Macintosh is the capability built into
the Mac's System file to add diacritical marks from languages other
than English.  
Having spent a great many years preparing materials in Spanish, I was a
little concerned about switching from a typewriter with an
international keyboard to a computer. I had visions of once again
writing in by hand all the diacritics and punctuation marks that I
needed. But the Macintosh is an international computer!    
Without additional software, the basic English-language Mac can produce
materials in foreign languages.  You can type on your Mac in French,
Spanish, Italian and German.  
To produce the grave and acute accents, the circumflex, the umlaut and
the tilde, you  use the option key with another character and follow it
with the letter you want modified.
Let's use ''*C*mo est* usted?'' as an example. To get *, press the
option-shift keys and type /; type uppercase C; then depress the option
key, type e (nothing appears on the screen) and then type o; continue
as you normally do.  
To type the *, depress the option key, type e, then type a.  That's all
there is to it.  
By the way, there are all kinds of interesting things hidden in the
fonts.  Even different sizes of the same font produce different
results.  Use your Key Caps DA and look around.
The following table shows you how to type the diacritics built into the
system.
Keyboard diacritics
  To produce this:     Type this:     Then type this:
 
 *  *  *  *  *     Option-`          letter
  *  *  *  *  *     Option-e          letter
  *  *  *  *  *     Option-i          letter
  *  *  *  *  *     Option-u          letter
 *  *  *     Option-n          letter 
  *          Option-c
 *          Option-a 
 *          Option-o
 *          Option-s
 *          Option-shift-/
  *          Option-1
 *          Option-\
 *          Option-shift -\
Using this method has certain disadvantages. It's slower than the
international keyboard, and you have to insert the diacritic before you
type the letter needing it.  
There is no non-erasing backspace or dead key. It's contrary to the way
we put in accents when we're writing.  
There are solutions. You can change the font you are using or you can
purchase a special set of fonts.
Linguists' Software of South Hamilton, Mass., has developed special
fonts for a number of languages.  All of the fonts come in a variety of
sizes.  
All of the overstrikes have  built-in, non-deleting backspacing so they
need no special keyboard command. You just type the keystroke for that
symbol and it automatically goes over the previous letter. 
The fonts are not copy protected and can be installed with the Font DA
Mover and selected directly from the font menu. You can easily move
from the special font to any other font for multilingual word
processing. 
You can see each font on the screen and print what you see.  The fonts
also allow you to select any of the style variations:  plain, italics,
bold, underline, outline and shadow.
I've been using its SuperFrench German Spanish for a little over two
years and have had absolutely no problem with it.  The font comes in
four sizes -- 10, 12, 20 and 24 point --  and includes the complete
character sets of over 70 other languages including Basque, Catalonian,
Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Irish,Polish, Swedish, Turkish, several American Indian languages and
several African languages.
In addition to this font, Linguists' Software offers several more. 
MacTransliterator has a set of letters sufficient for 75 languages and
includes 50 diacritical marks that can be used in combination with any
letter.  
MacPhonetics is a font containing the International Phonetic Alphabet. 
Tech is a font containing characters useful in mathematics, engineering
and science. SuperGreek includes all the special marks used in
classical scholarship; SuperHebrew includes both a classical and a
modern font, as well as a right-to-left desk accessory; 
MacCyrillic covers Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian;
MacKorean comes in three styles, Seoul, Pusan and Inchon; MacKana
includes hirigana, katakana and 70 of the most commonly used kanji.
Another company, Ecological Linguistics of Washington, D.C., has
developed integrated sets of fonts, string-comparison resources, and
keyboard desk accessories for dozens of languages. Each package comes
installed in a System file.
For more information about these fonts, write or call Linguists'
Software, 106R Highland St., South Hamilton, Mass. 01982 (617)468-3037
or  Ecological Linguistics, P.O. Box 15156, Washington, D.C. 
20003-0156 (202)546-5862.
The second solution is changing the font.  If you're creative and/or
courageous, youcan change the font yourself.  
You can change one letter or symbol, add characters to a font or create
an entirely new font. The program I've used is FONTastic from Altsys.  
With this program you can easily edit the font to change the look of
the letters, to change the symbols and to add characters or symbols.
Since there are quite a few combinations involving the Option key that
haven't been defined, there is ample room to add what you want.
Another program that will let you do the same thing is ResEdit.  Most
will agree it is not as user friendly as FONTastic.   
''Mac Insight''  by Lon Poole contains a lot of good information and
step by step directions for using ResEdit. In either case, you find the
font you want to change and edit the character as if it were in
FatBits.  
Fonts are fun. Diacritics are accessible. Whether you use the Mac's
system file, buy a special font or create your own font depends on your
needs.  
I've used them all.  My preference is SuperFrench German Spanish.  It
does what I want to do as fast as I want to do it.  For $49.95 it's a
bargain.
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