While we're waiting...

[rsc]

I'm thinking I should start introducing/referring to jwg as my fiance (and conversely, of course).

[Note: I really wanted to spell that with the accent, but PC-ignoramus that I am I can't figure/find out how to produce diacriticals. Any advice (for future reference) would be greatly appreciated.]

Comments

[jwg.livejournal.com]

'tis easy on a mac: fiancé

[jss]

Or, use the raw HTML, like "fiancé" to get "fiancé" to print.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that what showed up in the mail version of this comment is different from what showed up in LJ -- not very surprising, considering how I read my mail, but it means that I don't know what you actually typed. Nor do I know (although if I had to I could probably figure it out) how to generalize to other accents.

I have a feeling there's some way I could get at these things more conveniently than typing a bunch of raw HTML characters.

[jss]

What you see in plaintext mail is what I type. For example, the phrase

é

is me typing ampersand amp ; e acute ; (without the spaces) to get the web interface to display

é

which is ampersand e acute ; (without the spaces). (The ampersand is the start of an HTML special-character sequence, so if I want a plain ampersand as the "and" symbol or as a raw-HTML character I have to escape it by adding the "amp;" since "&" generates "&," gack.)

On MacOS, option-lowercase-E then the lowercase-E should generate the é character itself. On Windows, it's usually some escape like Control-Alt-Numpad(123) for the unicode sequence. (I hate Windows.)

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

The way I remember doing such things way back on my parents' 286 under DOS was to hold down the Alt key and then type in the decimal character code on the numeric keypad. (The regular number keys might also have worked; I don't recall, and that box is long dead.) Let's see... é is Unicode 0xE9, and I think the DOS/Windows charset is mostly ISO-Latin-1, so... Alt-(2-3-3). Assuming that feature still works.

The version you get by email is, I believe, the original text. The web-browser will process SGML ampersand-entities, obliging a literal ampersand to be escaped as & (i.e. [ampersand]amp;)

[bratman.livejournal.com]

the character map is your friend.
the keystrokes are alt+0233

or you could just grab it and load it into your buffer and than "ctrl v" it in when you need it.

Annoying yés, but once it's in your buffér you can usé it to your héart's contént.

héh

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Well, one problem is that it's not just "it". In this particular case I wanted e-acute, but some other time I might want a-grave, or o-dieresis (what most people call "umlaut"), and I certainly don't want to have to learn, let alone type, the codes for all of the damn things. One would think there would be shortcuts.

Then again, this being MS, maybe not.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Ahà!

The magic words turned out to be "character map". With a little assistance from my fiancé, I was able to figure out what this meant. The interface is a little clunky for typing text, but it doesn't come up that often.

Thanks.

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

I cheat.

I zip over to http://www.m-w.com, lookup the needed word, copy the gussied-up version, then paste.

Works great for fiancé, über, doppelgänger, bête noire, n' stuff.

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

Others have covered this, but:

(1) If you are using something that interprets escaped character codes, such as a browser, use é. Or à, ö, etc., to produce é, à, ö.

(2) You can use alt and the numeric keypad to produce several characters: alt-130 for é, alt-133 for à, alt-148 for ö, etc. You can play around with it to figure out the characters, or just google "character codes."