Inserting International Characters

International Characters on Windows

There are several methods of inserting diacritics into Windows documents. The table below describes the procedures for two common methods. Choose the one which best suits your needs.

Diacritics can be made in any windows application by using the “Alt + number” combination. Make sure “Num Lock“ is on and use the right-hand number keypad. This is a standard adopted by many in the past. Recently there have been some advances which have made inserting international characters into your document a bit more intuitive.

International Characters on Macintosh

Inserting diacritical characters from the keyboard requires a two sequence key press. The first set of key presses uses the option key usually in combination with another character to specify the diacritic. The second key press designates the letter. For example to type “ñ” on a Macintosh first press and release the key combination OPTION + ~ (tilde). Then type the letter n.

The following table demonstrates how to insert other diacritics for Macintosh:

Since the introduction of OSX, Macintosh users can use the "Character Palette" to input any unicode character. Select the character palette from the International Menu in the menu bar. Choose view "Roman." Then select "Accented Latin" to select a variety of accented characters.

International Characters on a Web Page

Inserting diacritical characters into a web document requires either setting the language encoding of the document to the desired character set, or the use of an HTML reference code.

To set the language of a page to a specific character encoding insert a meta tag similar to the one below for Unicode text into the head of the HTML document.

<META content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv=Content-Type>

Unicode encoding can be used for all languages. Both Windows XP and MacOSX will correctly display pages encoded in this format.

If only a few characters are needed you may get the best results by entering the HTML character reference code. Reference codes use a common syntax. The code is a decimal number or a reference word which is preceded by an ampersand character (&) and is terminated by a semicolon. See the University of Toronto's Introduction to HTML site for a more detailed description of character references.

The code for common international characters is listed in the table below:

For a more complete listing of character and entity references see the Lycos WebMonkey site.