Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 June 20

= June 20 =

Adding an accent
So I just tried to add an accented E (É) to an article, but appear to have lost the ability to do so without copy/pasting an existing character. As far as I can remember to create for example E acute, you would hold CTRL and E (caps optional), but it seems when I did this just now I didn't get a response. Instead the cursor disappears as if it were retrieving a pull down menu, but nothing was showing. Do I need to change a setting to get it to work again? I previously had no problems with this function, but admit I haven't used it for a while. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance, This is Paul (talk) 16:36, 20 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Wrong place for your post. Go to Help Desk. They are very fast over there. All the answers by the staff. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 16:59, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I should have made it clear I'm asking this question in a wider context, as currently it doesn't work on any browser or word processor. It was editing Wikipedia that brought it to my attention, but it's not a Wikipedia specific problem, so here is probably the right place. This is Paul (talk) 17:06, 20 June 2017 (UTC)


 * You are correct that in many Windows applications, you could type É by holding down Ctrl, pressing, and then pressing Shift-E. I just tested it and it didn't work. I assume it is part of the move to unicode. You have to memorize the unicode numbers for every letter now. Hopefully there is some setting to revert this change for users who want to continue to do it. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 17:33, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I think you can use the 'Special characters' menu in the toolbar. Ruslik_ Zero 17:56, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah yes, I just found it under "Latin". Great stuff. Thanks, Ruslik, and also thanks to the anonymous user as I thought it was something I'd done to change things, or a problem with my computer. Now if anyone can tell me how to do it in Word/Open Office/Libre Office I'll be back on track. This is Paul (talk) 18:25, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe they each have "insert special character" in the menus. (But I don't need to know this because I'm on MacOS, which has smarter keyboards.) —Tamfang (talk) 19:46, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
 * If I wanted to write an e-acute, I would hold down control, hit the apostrophe key, release control and hit the e key. This works in my word processor (word 2003) but not my browser (IE very old).  Perhaps you've misremembered the key sequence?  Ctrl-e is always likely to be a keyboard shortcut (like ctrl-p normally provdes print). Phil Holmes (talk) 07:45, 21 June 2017 (UTC)


 * (EC) I find it unlikely could ever just push ctrl + e (or other suitable letters) to get an accented character by default in Windows as this strongly risks conflicting with program shortcuts. If you had this option, I strongly suspect you did something to allow this. Windows is fairly flexible so it would be relatively easy to add support for it. As 209 hinted at, on some programs like Office it's possible to add accents by typing ctrl + some other character like grave mark ` then letting go and pushing a suitable letter. I just tested it on Word 2016 on Windows 10 Creator's Update and it still works. This is for Office 2007 [//support.office.com/en-us/article/Keyboard-shortcuts-for-international-characters-108fa0c1-fb8e-4aae-9db1-d60407d13c35] but I suspect its still current. Note as I said and the article indicates, you need to push ctrl + some other character like ^ including the shift if needed to get that character and then let go and quickly push the relevant letter (with shift if needed). I'm not sure if this was ever a general Windows feature, if it was I couldn't find much discussion of it which seems a bit weird, although there is a lot of discussion about alt codes so this is a difficult area to search. It's possible that it was supported on some other Windows programs besides Office but isn't any more and there is a Firefox addon which I think adds similar behaviour to Firefox [//addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/easyaccent/]. Personally I have doubts this was ever a universal feature. Although less common, I imagine there may be cases where ctrl + possible accent symbol (or ctrl + shift plus possibly accent sumbol, e.g. 6/^) will conflict with shortcut keys on some programs.  There are of course plenty of other options to enter accented characters on Windows. If you regularly do it, you may want to consider another keyboard layout. US International [//support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/306560/how-to-use-the-united-states-international-keyboard-layout-in-windows-7,-in-windows-vista,-and-in-windows-xp] would allow you to entered accented characters by simply pushing the accent like character and then the relevant letter although this obviously slows things down when you want to use the actual character. (E.g. Quotation marks or tilde!) You can switch between keyboard layouts with a chosen keyboard shortcut key if that helps.  For some more options see [//superuser.com/questions/110605/how-do-i-type-accented-characters-in-windows]. (Someone there claims the Finnish layout used to have the ctrl plus accent functionality but it no longer works although I wonder if they are remembering wrong or confused. It's specifically claimed here as being Word only functionality compared to US English International and I'm fairly sure that page isn't only thinking of Windows 10 although this doesn't prove it wasn't functionality in some other keyboard layout.) Note one of the options there is to create your own keyboard layout [//msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayouts.aspx] which I think still works on Windows 10 [//answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/custom-keyboard-layout-with-windows-10/b71c7905-1e30-4b0c-861b-253efd2b5a9e]. However I'm not sure if it's possible to introduce Word like functionality. You could however probably do it aith something like AutoHotKey. (Which someone else used to introduce OS X like functionality.)  Nil Einne (talk) 11:04, 21 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Assuming the typing language is French, the BÉPO keyboard layout allows accentuated capitals (the official website [fr] contains installation instructions). Tigraan Click here to contact me 11:41, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. I bought my current computer from a place that builds their own machines, so from what's been said above it sounds like it may have been set up that way, and perhaps cancelled out by a Windows update. I'll give the above suggestions a go anyway. Cheers, This is Paul (talk) 16:50, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
 * If you have a UK keyboard, try AltGr+e. 78.0.193.196 (talk) 23:35, 21 June 2017 (UTC)