[sw-l] Accents Made Easier...Article about Windows XP

Valerie Sutton sutton at SIGNWRITING.ORG
Sat Oct 23 21:11:20 UTC 2004


http://www.hackensackhigh.org/~menditd/xpkey.html

Accents Made Easier

If you are running Windows XP on your computer, changing to the United 
States International Keyboard is a little more complicated than with  
Windows '98. However, it is well worth the effort!

Instructions for Converting Windows XP Keyboard
	• 	Go to START/CONTROL PANEL/Date, Time, Language and Regional Options
	• 	PICK A TASK:
  ADD OTHER LANGUAGES--Click on the Languages Tab/Details
	• 	In the TEXT SERVICES AND INPUT LANGUAGES dialog box/ INSTALLED 
SERVICES section, click on ADD.

	• 	In the KEYBOARD LAYOUT/IME section of the ADD INPUT LANGUAGE dialog 
box, click on the dropdown arrow and click on United 
States-International/OK
	• 	 At the bottom of the TEXT SERVICES box, you will see 
Preferences--Language Bar. Click on LANGUAGE BAR.
	• 	 The LANGUAGE BAR DIALOG BOX will come up: UNCHECK--turn off 
advanced text services.
  CHECK: Show the Language bar on the desktop, Show additional Language 
bar icons in the Notification area, Show text labels on the Language 
bar/OK.
	• 	Click Apply/OK.
You may be asked to restart your computer.
	• 	 Once this is done, the Language Bar will appear on your Desktop. 
You may drag it to the bottom or leave it on the top.
	• 	 In order to switch to the International Keyboard, place your mouse 
over the keyboard icon. When the pop-up box appears, click United 
States International, and you are ready to go!

  Accessing the accented characters is quite easy because the characters 
for acute, grave, and circumflex accents, the apostrophe, quotation 
marks and tildes have now been made into "dead" keys, which means that 
nothing happens immediately upon pressing the apostrophe key or another 
accent key. If the next key pressed is a vowel, an accented vowel will 
appear. For an accented a (á), for example, just type the apostrophe, 
then the a; for an accented e (é), type the apostrophe, then the e. For 
an è, type the backward apostrophe ` then the e: è. An i with a 
circumflex is created by typing the circumflex (shift 6: ^) then the i: 
î. This also works with the double quote (") for the umlaut 
(dieresis/diaeresis) and the tilde (ñ, ã). If you just want to type an 
apostrophe or quotation marks, hit that key, then the next letter or 
the space bar.

  For the Spanish upsidedown question mark and exclamation point: type 
right ALT+/ to get ¿ and type right ALT+1 to get ¡. This is easy to 
remember because you are using the right alt key plus the keys which 
have the ! and ?.

  This is so much easier than the  ASCII Numbers that you will be happy 
you spent the time to change the keyboard. The instructions look 
complicated, but they are not when you see the boxes come up. Print 
them out and follow along.
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