Typing foreign words. How do you change script?

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"Be not deceived by the sweet words of proverbial philosophy. Sugar of lead is a poison."

Do you mean how to get weird characters?

I cheat--I open word, go to insert | symbol, select the character i want, and then paste it into whatever document I'm working on.

This isn't a foolproof method, however.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

If you're on a PC, and if you're prudent and use a limited character set, here's how to find them without opening MS Word.

Bear with me, I'm in XP here: Go to Programs / accessories / system tools / character map. (It might be somewhere else on your 'puter.)

Try, for example, Arial or Verdana, both venerable fonts (and on everybody's Windows computer). Select the small e-acute, a pretty commonly used glyph (or is it a ligature, with the accent?). Character map will give you a chance to copy it.

But if you want to be a real geek about it, make a note of the keystroke code in the lower right-hand corner. For your e-acute, it's Alt+0233. Hold down Alt, and use the keypad (the numbers off on the right of the regular keyboard) to type the numbers. = é

I have a small set of characters that I use frequently memorized: ¶, ‡, †, and so on. There aren't keycodes for every possible character, especially in extended fonts. But most accented letters are there. How often do you need Hindi or Cyrillic characters?

It will look like gibberish on a Mac system, though. Just like you (on your Windows box) see strange characters for quotation marks when you view some web pages created on a Mac.

M

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Marguerite
Gettysburg

ܨܞܖܦ
Cool.
Thanks.

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"Be not deceived by the sweet words of proverbial philosophy. Sugar of lead is a poison."

Anyone know how to do it in *Nix?

I do have OOO....

BTW: I see above charecters perfectley in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux.

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Chicago Caledonians G4
Wannabe flutist

I used a program to modify my keyboard layout, and converted an unused key to produce £ and € instead of \ and | (for some unknown reason my laptop came with two identical keys for \ and |).

I then promptly forgot how I did this, but I'm sure a well-reasoned Google search would turn something up if you want to try this route for oft-used characters.

If it's just little things like money you need, you might be able to change the language your computer thinks it's supposed to be speaking. This enables it to recognize the spelling quirks of any region you choose.

Start
Control Panel
Regional and Language Options
English (United Kingdom)

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Cotelette d'Agneau