symbol sets and rattlesnake.

[Carolyn Quintero]

Thanks, John, for the advice.  The problem with this solution is that the
Spanish keyboard has many characters in the "wrong" places on the keyboard.
It's so confusing, especially if you use another keyboard at times, that
it's not worth the hassle.  I've gone this route, even relabling my keyboard
with little stick-on labels, but it's a mess.
Carolyn
----- Original Message -----
From: "Koontz John E" <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 10:19 AM
Subject: Re: symbol sets and rattlesnake.


On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Carolyn Quintero wrote:
> -Š       I see dash ^J (which is a carriage control)
> ŠŠŠ    I see ^J^J^J
> š        I see ^Z
> ã         I see a pi
> æ         I see a mu
> ð         I see the three-bar equivalence sign
> ñ         I see the plus or minus sign
> I would like to thank Brad Coon, and say that I worked on this problem for
a
> long time with several computer folks, and none were able to solve it for
> me.  Thanks a million, Brad.  Now, can I make macros to use these special
> characters in Outlook Express so I don't have to type in so many codes.  I
> do quite a bit of correspondence in Spanish and need the Spanish
> characters..upside down question mark and exclamation mark, enye, accented
> vowels, umlaut.
> BTW, since I'm on a laptop, ofcourse the number pad is activated by the Fn
> key.  Alt, Fn, +code gets the characters.

Incidentally, if the issue is typing Spanish in Windows it is possible to
install a Windows Spanish keyboard definition (there are a number of
different ones) or the USA International, and get your keyboard set up so
that certain keys now work as they would in Spain, Mexico, etc., to
produce enye, Spanish quotation marks, etc., or certain sequences of keys
(in the USA International) will do this.  This only solves part of the
problems for Siouanists, but nails down Spanish pretty well.  You need
your Windows disk handy, since Windows will need some files off of it, and
you start from settings > control panel > keyboard > language.  You can
select the active keyboard (if you have several installed ) in the tray or
in the login display.  In my experience all recent versions of Windows
sometimes drop tray icons at login time (they just never appear), at least
if you have a lot.  There's some chatter about this on the net as an
unsolved bug.  I believe you can select in this case in the keyboard tool.

The real problem with this is that it can be a bit difficult to choke the
descriptions of the keyboards (what characters where) out of the Microsoft
site.  I have managed in the past by being persistant.

The Spanish, etc., solution don't work for Siouan because we have some
character + diacritic combinations not imagined in Eastern Europe (let
alone the Peninsula).

Of course, the Corvinologists can get along with the basic English
keyboard.