I always wonder how people can remember the character combinations to type special characters from a regular US international keyboard on a Mac with OS X, or Windows computer.
When having to type a lot of international text, I often use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 7, in Windows Vista, and in Windows XP.
When not, I often use Character Map. Too bad there is no shortcut for it.
Choosing the U.S International – PC on a Mac OS X (as it behaves exactly like the PC counterpart on Windows) however introduces problems when using Remote Desktop Connection or virtualization software like VMware Fusion or Parallels.
So I sometimes revert to “Special Charters” (option-command-T) under the Edit menu (also called Character Viewer), but usually take advantage that ApplePressAndHoldEnabled by default is enabled: that allows the press-and-hold feature for vowel keys, and then either use the digit keys or arrows to select the target accented character.
On both systems, there are other ways to type special characters using keyboard shortcuts that I find very hard to remember. For people with a good memory, you can try these:
- Typing Special Characters – Microsoft Standard English (United States 101) Keyboard.
- Typing Special Characters on a Macintosh Keyboard.
- Typing Special Characters – Microsoft English US-International Keyboard.
–jeroen
via: Macintosh OSX Keyboards (Penn State).
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