Re: Foreign characters in English text

["Jon Inggs" joni@xxxxxxxx]

Dead accents can be set as a default in WINDOWS itself which
will then work with all WINDOWS software. You do this by
selecting the US-INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD LAYOUT in the INTERNATIONAL
settings in CONTROL PANEL.

Hey presto, and all CTRL " ' ` ^ etc attach the appropriate accent to
the next letter (if it is an accentable letter of course). The only
drawback is that it is a bit annoying when entering formulas in a
spreadsheet.

We discovered this a year or so ago when our Department finally
succumbed to university pressure and moved from XyWrite 4 for DOS to
WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows (a fate worse than death it has turned
out to be - its only strong point is TABLES and its only saving
grace is the ability to view formatters).

Someone came in one day after installing WPF at home and claimed it
could do accents the same way as I had set up XyWrite to do using S1,
S2 etc on the CTRL keys for " ' ` ^ etc. All our courses are
prepared in English and Afrikaans which uses all the standard
accents.

None of the university's network WordPerfect's could do the
accents so a computer technician came in and spent a couple of days
finding out why not and pinpointed the INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD
setting. Obviously Uncle Bill liked what he saw in XyWrite and had
it implemented.

The other annoying accent related thing about both WordPerfect and
Word is that they both have AUTOMATIC QUOTATIONS set as a default.
This means that the Afrikaans 'n (which means a as in a dog and a
cat) gets automatically changed to `n because the program assumes you
are opening a single quote. Almost all Afrikaans documents I get -
even official government and university stuff - have the inverted `n
because nobody seems to know how to change it. In fact is now
fast becoming the norm. Again, it is just a setting within the WPF
and Word defaults.

Regards
Jon Inggs

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From:	TBaehr@xxxxxxxx [SMTP:TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]
> > Sent:	Thursday, March 16, 2000 10:19 PM
> > To:	xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> > Subject:	Re: Foreign characters in English text
> >
> > Here are the function calls for accents:
> > Acute=S1 (put on Ctrl + ')
> > Grave=S2 (Ctrl + `)
> > Umlaut=S3 (Ctrl + Shift + ")
> > Circumflex=S4 (Ctrl + ^)
> > Overcircle (as for Angstrom)=S5 (?- not in my keyboard file)
> > Tilde=S6 (Ctrl + Shift + ~)
> >
> > The Ctrl key assignments are just suggestions, but they're pretty easy to
> > remember.
> >
> > These are called "dead accents" - a remnant of typesetting days when you
> > could hit a dead accent character and the carriage wouldn't advance until
> > the
> > next character was typed. I suspect someone typing *only* French could
> > save
> > key strokes with dedicated character keys. You'd have to find a place for
> > them in your keyboard table.
> >
> > Tim Baehr
> > tbaehr@xxxxxxxx
>
> Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 09:38:36 EST
> From: TBaehr@xxxxxxxx
> To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Foreign characters in English text
> Message-ID: <3e.1c6f5c7.26039d6c@xxxxxxxx>

> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> One more thing about the "dead" accents: XyWrite has had them since at least XYIII; I don't remember whether they were assigned to keys.
>
> Also MSWord had the "dead" accents assigned to the Ctrl key combinations I laid out in my original post. If you use both word processors, there's a bit of standardization. (Wouldn't be surprised if M>
> Cheers,
> Tim Baehr
> tbaehr@xxxxxxxx

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Try the Economic History Society of Southern Africa
WWW site at: http://home.intekom.com/joni/ehsoc.htm

Jon Inggs        e-Mail: inggsej@xxxxxxxx
Economics Department
Unisa
PO Box 392
PRETORIA
South Africa
0003