Type text in any language

Type text in any language

Type international languages using a Windows computer with an English keyboard

Introduction

You may only occasionally need to type text that includes international and accented characters, perhaps when writing to a friend in another country or booking a holiday abroad, but for others it is a constant problem.

This is especially so for language students and foreigners living in English-speaking countries where most computers are equipped with English keyboards.

Fortunately, Windows can cope with the needs of all these users, though the technique that’s most appropriate varies according to circumstances.

This Workshop will introduce the main methods of typing international characters — using the Windows Character Map, keyboard shortcuts, Microsoft Word special keys or by ‘remapping’ the keyboard – and will help you choose which is most appropriate for you.

1. Both XP and Vista are equipped with an accessory called Character Map, whose job is to help you type foreign characters and other special symbols. For casual users this is the simplest approach because it involves no setting up of the computer and there is no need to memorise any special keys or techniques. To open Character Map, click the Start button and place the mouse pointer over All Programs, then click Accessories, followed by System Tools, followed by Character Map.

2. When it opens, Character Map displays a table of all the characters that can be typed in the conventional way using the keyboard plus many additional symbols and foreign characters. Hundreds more characters are available by using the scroll bar at the right-hand side of Character Map. Every time the chevron at the bottom of the scroll bar is clicked, another line of characters is revealed. Use the upper chevron to scroll back to the beginning. Fortunately, the most frequently required accented characters are on the initial screen.

3. At the top, Character Map displays the name of the font selected when Character Map was last used. It’s a good idea to change this to the font being used in your current document because when you copy characters from Character Map to another program, they always retain their selected Character Map font. To change the font, click the current font name to display a dropdown list. If you have a lot of fonts, use the scroll bar (as you did in Step 2) to view them all. Click to select the font you wish to use.

4. You can choose to insert individual accented characters from Character Map into the current document or you can create the entire word in Character Map. The choice is yours and probably depends on how long the word is and how many accents it contains. In the case of a French word such as garçon, we’d plump for copying the special character of single c with cedilla. Do this by double-clicking the c with cedilla in Character Map, and when the character is displayed in the panel at the bottom of Character Map, click the Copy button.

5. Using the buttons on the Windows Taskbar at the bottom of the screen, switch to Microsoft Word or whatever program you are using to create the current document. Click in the document to position the text-entry cursor where you would like the special character to appear, and then paste it into place using the keyboard paste shortcut (hold down Ctrl and press V). Alternatively, click the Edit menu and select Paste. In either case, you may need to use the normal Insert and Delete keys to tidy up any extra spaces and line breaks that may appear.

6. If you tend to use just a few accented characters, but you use them frequently, there is a quick way of inserting individual characters by using keyboard shortcuts. To do so, make sure that Num Lock is on, and then hold down the left Alt key and type the appropriate three- or four-digit code on the numeric keypad on the right of a standard keyboard. For example, Alt and 0234 produces an e with a circumflex as used in the French word fenêtre. You can view a complete list of Alt codes for every European language at the Vistawide language website (www.snipurl.com/aldti).

7. The Character Map and Alt and numeric code techniques work with all Windows programs, but there is an even more convenient trick if you are using Microsoft Word. Let’s say you want to insert an e with an acute accent above it, as in the word passé. Simply hold down the Ctrl key and tap the apostrophe key to indicate you require an acute accent, then release the Ctrl key and tap the E key. In fact, Ctrl can be used together with several other punctuation marks to produce the accent that most closely resembles each mark.

8. If you need to type long passages of foreign text rather than just a few odd words, it is faster to modify the English keyboard layout so that it emulates the appropriate foreign language. To avoid confusion you can stick temporary key labels over those keys that are different from English or you can print out a chart and keep it next to the keyboard for reference. You will find suitable keyboard charts for most European languages on the Wikipedia website at www.snipurl.com/algur.

9. Setting up an English keyboard to work like a foreign one is not as difficult as it sounds, and once it has been done it is possible to switch between English and alternative languages with a couple of clicks. To set up an alternative keyboard using Windows XP (the procedure is similar, though not identical, in Windows Vista), click the Start button and then click Control Panel. When the Control Panel opens, click the underlined link labelled Date, Time, Language and Regional options.

10. When the Date, Time, language and Regional options are displayed, click the link for Regional and Language options to view its dialogue box. At the top of the dialogue box, click the Languages tab and then the Details button. This opens a second dialogue box entitled Text Services and Input Languages. It displays the languages that are currently installed and the keyboards used to access them. In the example pictured here there is a single language (English) and a single keyboard (United Kingdom).

11. Click the Add button. This displays a small dialogue box containing two dropdown lists with which you can choose to install new languages and new keyboards. Because we’re only interested in typing foreign characters while continuing to use Windows in English, it is only necessary to install a keyboard, and not the language itself. To do this, click on the panel labelled Keyboard layout/IME to view a list of keyboards, and then click the one you desire. Use the scroll bar (as you did in Step 2) if the language you require is not visible. Click OK.

12. The Text Services and Input Languages dialogue box now shows a single language (English) but two keyboards (French and United Kingdom). Click the Language Bar button to view a small dialogue box labelled Language Bar Settings. Ensure that the only option to be ticked is Show the language bar on the desktop. Click OK to close this dialogue box, then OK to close the Text Services and Input Languages dialogue box, and then OK to close the Regional and Language options dialogue box. Close the Control Panel by clicking the X in its top right-hand corner.

13. You can now switch between the French and UK keyboard layouts by clicking the tiny keyboard icon that is displayed next to the icons on the right of the Windows Taskbar. On clicking this, a small window appears in which you can select the appropriate layout. If you select the third option, which is Show the language bar, it turns the discreet keyboard icon into a toolbar that can be moved around the screen. To return to the keyboard icon, click the Minimise icon (a tiny bar) at the top right of the toolbar.

14. You can now test the new keyboard layout by opening Wordpad or any word processor and typing QWERTYUIOP[]. If the French keyboard is selected, this produces the sequence AZERTYUIOP¨£. Exactly the same techniques as those described in Steps 9 to 12 can be used to install additional keyboard layouts for other languages. Unwanted keyboard layouts can be removed by following Steps 9 and 10, highlighting the offending layout and then clicking the Remove button. When no alternative keyboards are available, the keyboard icon on the Windows Taskbar is no longer displayed.