Foreign and Special Characters in Word Processing

When foreign-language students want to type in their new language, they almost universally face the problem of how to enter the accented and special characters that exist in their new language, but not in English. Most beginners do not realize that most personal computers do support foreign characters and that there are a number of options open to them.

This page will concentrate on foreign-language support under Windows 95/98, since that is currently the system used on most PCs and Windows 2000 support should be based on it. However, I will also mention a few other systems, namely Windows 3.1, MS-DOS, and the MacIntosh. Also, while there are ways to set up your computer to function exclusively as a non-English system, I do not intend to address that issue here. I am only interested here with the temporary solutions that will enable the user to deal with the occasional foreign-language character or document while maintaining his computer as an English-language system.

I will cover five different kinds of solutions:

1. Using Keyboard Drivers
2. Using Character Map
3. Using the Numeric Keypad
4. Application-Specific Methods (eg, Word 97)

Using Keyboard Drivers

A keyboard driver is system software that maps a particular layout of characters and functions to the keys of the PC keyboard. By selecting the particular keyboard driver for a particular country's keyboard layout, your keyboard becomes a keyboard of that country and you can just type away in that language. This is a very good approach for typing sizable amounts of foreign language text. This would be the ideal approach, if it didn't also require you to learn a new keyboard.

Windows and DOS support changing keyboard drivers, but to different degrees:

• Windows 95/98 enables the user to have several different keyboard drivers loaded all at the same time and it provides a very flexible environment for rapid and easy switching between keyboards. Very rapid and easy.
• Windows 3.1 only allows one keyboard driver to be loaded at a time, requiring you to go through the installation procedure all over again each time you want to change keyboards.
• MS-DOS is even more restrictive, requiring you to change the configuration files and reboot the system.

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Using Character Map

Character Map is a Windows utility program with which you can view all the characters of any font installed on your system along with their keystrokes or character codes. You can also select and copy any number of characters to the clipboard for pasting into your document.

This would be the prefered approach for entering individual special characters for single words or phrases, especially considering its following of the basic Windows point-and-click philosophy. However, it can become cumbersome very quickly with any sizable amount of text. I would usually copy the set of special characters into the document, then copy and paste them there as needed.

Character Map is available in Windows 95/98 and in Windows 3.1. Being a Windows utility, Character Map is not available in MS-DOS.

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Using the Numeric Keypad

The most universally available approach is entering the special character's code through the Numeric Keypad. This approach would work for individual special characters, but would be too cumbersome for any sizable amount of text. It is available in Windows 95/98, Windows 3.1, and in MS-DOS, but be careful: the actual characters produced may vary according to which system you are using. Details are provided on my Using the Numeric Keypad page.

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Application-Specific Methods

DOS applications that required special-character entry have always had that support built into them by their programmers. Unfortunately, since there were no user-interface standards in DOS, every programmer would have done it differently. This meant that every application would have a different way to input special characters, forcing users to learn a different special technique for each program. Worse yet, in most DOS applications the programmer never anticipated the need for inputting special characters and so that feature was never included. Sorry, you need to learn each of these individually.

Many Windows application programs continue this troublesome DOS tradition, though a few are noteworthy, such as Microsoft's Word 97, if for no other reason than its large user base. Word's set of keyboard shortcuts for entering a number of special characters are also fairly intuitive -- once you have learned the basic approach -- and Word directly supports inserting symbols into the document.

I offer instructions on using Word 97's special character shortcuts on my Keyboard Shortcuts in Word 97 page.

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