Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive.... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience
Start - Accessories - system tools - character map - select, copy and paste.
But it is so much of a hassle I usually don't bother!
Agreed, that is too much hassle, whereas the Alt Gr-e method is very simple but doesn't cover everything, e.g. Alt Gr-a gives you á when for French you need à.
Another quick method when you need accented characters just for the odd word is to use Alt+the numeric keyboard (i.e. the number pad on the right, it doesn't work with the numbers near the top of the keyboard), but you need to remember a few ASCII codes, e.g. for French:
Alt+ 130 = é 131 = â 133 = à 135 = ç 136 = ê 138 = è
(if you want letters with umlauts for German, try the numbers missing in the above sequence)
If you're typing a lot in one language though, it's best to go into Control Panel / Regional & Language Options / Languages tab / click the Details button and add in any languages you think you'll need - this is the way to do it in Windows XP anyway. Then you should see a little "EN" in the taskbar which you can switch to any other languages you have set up when you need them.
The drawback of this last method is that your keyboard will start to act completely like the standard keyboard in whichever language you have picked at the time, e.g. on the French keyboard, W and Z will be swapped as well as all the accented characters becoming available.
Some languages like Polish cleverly have an option that keeps the keyboard the same as the English one but makes the Alt Gr thing that freerider mentioned work for the characters in that language, e.g. if you select PL as your language, Alt Gr+s, l, L, a, e, o, z, x will give you , , , , , ó, , , etc, meaning (for example) that you can spell the name of former president Lech Wasa or the town of ód correctly.
Edit: this works almost everywhere but not on this board, which as you can see, only seems to recognise ó and ignores the other Polish characters!
Apologies for aiding and abetting the hijacking of this thread, Rob
-- Edited by steven at 08:49, 2008-03-05
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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!