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Neat ways of doing French accents

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17762660/characters.exe

A former student sent me the above link to a piece of software which allows you do French accents more speedily than with ALT numbers. It's free download designed by a fellow student. One or two people I know thought it was very good, but I found the scrolling process a bit of a nuisance. Maybe a bit of practice is needed.

I'm doing this post on the ipad which has a handy system for accents which it shares with the iphone. You just slide away from the letter and you are offered all the possible accents. I used to occasionally use shortcuts on a traditional keyboard using CTRL ALT and punctuation marks, but now use ALT with code numbers.

Code numbers are a nuisance on notebooks, however, so the download I have linked to could be particularly useful for laptop users. Give it a try!

Alternatively, download Lexibar. This little dowload places an icon on your desktop. When you activate it a vertical, narrow and movable bar appears with all your French accented characters. You have to move the cursor to them, but it could suit some people.

In Word you can choose your language, type away ignoring accernts and then hover over words afterwards. Correct versions with accents will appear which you can then insert.

Laura Lawless on the About site recommends the International Keyboard. Haven't tried this, but you could look into it.

If you are really smart you can set up your own hot keys which are easier than thwe exisiting ones in Windows whereby you hold down two or three keys simultaneously to produce accented characters. Can't do this yet, but that would be a nifty solution.

We are all creatures of habit, so I may stick with ALT codes for the moment. They work fine on a desktop, but don't work for notebook users.

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