Peter T. Daniels <grammatim at worldnet dot att dot net> wrote:

>>> Go to Word Help and search for "Insert an international character
>>> by using a shortcut key." You might be pleasantly surprised.
>
> I don't really want to type a 9-word sentence into the search box.

Who does? If you've used searchable help systems before, including
Windows Help and Google, you probably know that the more specific your
search term, the more likely you are to hit a match the first time. You
can type "international character" and probably get close. You can type
"shortcut key" and probably not get very close, because, as you said,
Word uses lots of shortcut keys.

Words like "an" and "a" usually don't help much. I was just giving you
the exact title so you'd hit it the first time, and not have to complain
about finding the item you wanted in a sea of other items.

>> If you do this JUST ONCE, you will get a nice, handy, printable list
>
> I didn't get a printer with the Windows box.

Well, OK, then write it out by hand, or leave the help window on your
screen, or memorize it, or something. The mechanism does exist within
Word, which was your original question.

>> You don't need to visit Help for every such accented
>> character you need to type.
>
> Did someone suggest one did need to?

You had written:

>> Go to Word Help
>> and search for "Insert an international character by
>> using a shortcut key." You might be pleasantly surprised.
>
> And if one routinely uses 15 or 20 of them?
>
> I'm now editing and typesetting for a publisher who has just put a
> Windows machine in my office. I thus have occasion to type all sorts
> of accents in European and Semitic languages. Dealing with each one
> individually that way would be a most unpleasant surprise.

That last sentence was unclear to me. The Help page shows you how to
type each of several dozen "extended characters." Your response made it
sound as though you would have to visit Help for each of the 15 or 20
extended characters you need.

>> Jelks was kind enough to copy and paste the chart which you could
>> have gotten from Word Help by following my suggestion.
>
> How do you know that I hadn't already followed your suggestion?

You had written:

> Where in Word's Help will I find this table?

which would be an interesting rhetorical question if you had already
followed my suggestion, which showed exactly where to find the table.

> So how do you type the quote marks? And what about grave and
> circumflex? Offhand that layout [U.S. International] sounds like it's
> made for Spanish and nothing else.

Richard answered this question about dead key behavior. (That's the
root of my learning curve; my brain knows what to do, it's just a matter
of retraining my fingers.)

As far as Spanish-only is concerned, the U.S. International keyboard is
intended to handle the Latin-1 repertoire (plus Euro and directional
single-quotes). Whether that repertoire is biased more toward Spanish
than other languages is debatable; it is supposed to include all
orthographic letters used in German, Italian, Portuguese, Scandinavian
languages, and others, and almost all used in French.

Annoyingly, U.S. International has no keys for directional
double-quotes. I've developed a layout I like much better (you have to
press AltGr for the dead keys, leaving the original U.S. layout
unaltered) that has many more available characters, and implemented it
using MSKLC. Which means, sadly, that I can't use it at home under
Windows Me. (Yes, I know... use Keyman...)

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/