Keying Popular Orthographies in MS Word

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 2 May 2001, Language wrote:

> In MSWord 97 and higher, we use the "Insert" menu, "Symbol..." and in
> <normal text> there are the vowels "a e i u" with "little right hooks"
> underneath , which is what we used for the nasal vowels even before
> Microsoft caught up.  The "c-hachek" or "c-wedge" (as we like to call
> it) is also in there.  Unfortunately this doesn't work for the MS
> e-mail program Outlook or any e-mail program for that matter so we use
> "Vowel+N" for nasals.  I can receive e-mails written in German and
> French and not lose any of the umlauts, or accents but the
> software/computer industry is still backwards linguistically.

I prefer a less menu-oriented approach to inserting special characters if
I can manage it, since you need two or three a word in OP.

SIL (www.sil.org) distributes the TavulteSoft KeyMap program, which can be
used to redefine keyboards to create various kinds of keystroke
combinations that will insert characters not ordinarily accessible from
the keyboard.  For example, I like alt-a + V, where V is the vowel letter,
capitalized or not, as a way to enter nasal vowels.  This program works in
all Windows programs.  You do have to switch to any font you require for
special characters.  My recollection is that the basic Windows ABSI fonts
is rather chinzy with what vowels it will combine with nasal-hook, so I
suspect you are using a special font.  Maybe Andy Anderson's?

The downside of using KeyMap is that it is a bit of a black art, learning
to write the keyboard definitions.  I did write some for use with the
Standard Siouan fonts.  Also, Bob Rankin has had problems using the
previous version (2?) with Australian versions of Windows, if I recall the
combination of circumstances.  Furthermore the newest version didn't like
my older keyboard definitions.  On the other hand, I think this is the
most generic way to go as it works across applications.  I don't recall if
can access Word macro facilities to generate superscript characters, but
it may be able to.  However, of course, these won't work in Outlook, etc.

If you want a menu-based approach that works in different applications,
try the Windows Character Map accessory.  It's not quite as nice as the
Word symbol insertion tool.

JEK