Manipulation des lettres françaises

This morning, I received an urgent phone call from George who was having some difficulty in composing a French-language email as the letters with accents and other special symbols do not appear on English-language keyboards.

Somebody at work helpfully suggested that he should enter ASCII codes for these characters without mentioning how this might be done or where to find the appropriate codes.

Being quite 'mature', George vaguely remembers a fellow called Arthur Askey who went round saying things like "Hello playmates!" and "Ay Thang-Yew" but was not particularly noted as a computer pioneer.

Those of a nerdish tendency can indeed use the various keyboard 'modifier' keys (ctrl, alt, etc) in combination with one or more other keys to produce special characters.

For example, on my UK keyboard

        'Alt Gr' together with a produces á
        'Alt Gr' together with $ produces €

Unfortunately, there are also a number of key combinations or 'shortcuts' which execute various software commands—so erroneous key-combinations can cause great confusion.

If you really want to get into this stuff, just do an internet search on 'keyboard special symbols'

French people, of course, use a French keyboard which would be a good solution if one were working mainly in French—I personally find it rather inconvenient to cope with the different positions of some essential characters like the full stop which is needed for web site addresses.

However, there is a perfectly simple alternative if you use Microsoft Word as your email editor—simply click INSERT/SYMBOL when typing your message and up springs a table of the special symbols associated with the font that you are currently using.

Here are some of the special symbols available with the Arial font—è  é  ?  á  â ç © ?

Helpfully, the most recently-used symbols are listed in a row at the bottom which removes the need for scrolling through the entire table every time.

I use Microsoft Outlook which supports this facility directly but, if your email client doesn't, you can simply place the special characters into a Word document and then transfer with Copy/Paste

So you can easily handle French, German and various other languages without becoming a nerd.

PS   Use the http://babelfish.altavista.com for free translations between several common languages—it's not as good as a human translator but usually adequate to convey the gist of the message.

Comments

[Father Brian]

If you frequently use French letters (or German, Spanish or Eastern European languages with accents), another method is to put a Character Map short-cut on your desktop.

Find it at Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools.

This displays a grid of all characters in the Windows character set which can then be selected, copied and pasted where required.

You can also pre-select from the available fonts on your PC.

As the old newspaper ad used to say, "I never knew there was so much in it"!

[Les King]

Yes indeed—that looks like a very neat method for any email client or other software that doesn't support the direct insertion of special characters.

Certainly better than messing about with multiple key strokes and codes.