Mar 05, '10 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: pietervw
If you regularly use a language that requires letters with diacritics -- such as á, ä, é, ë, í, ã, ñ, õ, etc. as they are used in Spanish, French or Portuguese -- and you recently switched from Windows to Mac OS X as I have, you might find this hint useful.
In Windows, while there were various ways to enter these characters, the best one of them was just to enter a ' and then the vowel, and you would get the accented version of that letter (in this example, the letter with the acute diacritic).
In Mac OS X however, if you set the keyboard layout to a language that has these letters (such as Spanish), you cannot use this trick; the only way of inputting these letters is the standard way supplied in Mac OS X (Option-e then e for é; Option-e, then i for í; etc.). I personally found this very annoying, and searched for quite a while on how to change this.
The answer is a lot simpler than I expected. If you use the US International - PC keyboard layout, you instantly get the fast way of entering the letters with diacritics back!
Go to System Preferences » Language & Text » Input Sources. Check the US International - PC input method in the list of Input Methods. (If you also use other Input Methods, uncheck the others or select the US International - PC method as the current Input Method.)
Now you can use the fastest way of entering these characters.
- For á, é, í, ó, ú: press ' and directly after that, the vowel.
- For à, è, ì, ò, ù: press ` and directly after that, the vowel. (Note that ` is slightly different slightly different from ' ... on my keyboard, it is located right of the left-side Shift key.)
- For ä, ë, ï, ö, ü: press " and directly after that, the vowel.
- For ã, ñ, õ: press ˜ and directly after that, the letter.
