French accent letters using windows character map

[MikeK36]

In my other graphic design software, I use windows character map to select, copy and paste accented letters into my text.

This doesn't work with AD - I don't want to go and change Language because of spell check etc - is there a workaround?

[GarryP]

That works for me but I always seem to get an unwanted newline for some reason (I don’t use it often so it’s not a big problem for me).
Have you tried the in-built Glyph Browser (menu “Text → Show Glyph Browser”) instead?

[MikeK36]

Hi Gary P

I've not seen that before - just spent 10 minutes trying the get a lower case acute e - nothing....

Eventually, I work out that you have to double not single click the glyph!

Many thanks.

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, MikeK36 said:

just spent 10 minutes trying the get a lower case acute e

Holding down the right-hand Alt key (marked Alt Gr on a UK Windows keyboard) and pressing a vowel key will put an acute accent on that vowel.

[MikeK36]

Just tried - select the artistic text tool, click on the page, hold RH Alt+E and I get the edit menu!

lol  English South African keyboard

The double click will work for me

[William Overington]

This might be helpful.

https://www.evertype.com/alphabets/french.pdf

I have just now tried copying from that page and pasting an â character to a text frame in Affinity Designer. Just format as to size and font once pasted into Affinity Designer.

I pasted the â in this post from the clipboard too.

One of a collection of PDF (Portable Document Format) documents linked from the following page.

https://www.evertype.com/alphabets/

William

 

 

 

 

[Wosven]

I usually use this site for characters I don't know the code (and not on my french keyboard), to copy, get the HTML code, etc.:

https://unicode-table.com/

 

[Wosven]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

This might be helpful.

https://www.evertype.com/alphabets/french.pdf

Quote

Quotation marks: ‹_single_›

Not in French french… I don't understand where those come from, I didn't even know how to type them before stumbling on them in the Wikipédia page. And never saw them in any book (but we had interesting uses of double quotes in the past, that are sadly unpractical or difficult  to reproduce with modern software).

[MikeK36]

16 hours ago, William Overington said:

This might be helpful.

https://www.evertype.com/alphabets/french.pdf

I have just now tried copying from that page and pasting an â character to a text frame in Affinity Designer. Just format as to size and font once pasted into Affinity Designer.

I pasted the â in this post from the clipboard too.

One of a collection of PDF (Portable Document Format) documents linked from the following page.

https://www.evertype.com/alphabets/

William

Works like a charm! Thank you!

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

An interesting story that I have told before elsewhere might be of interest.

One day in the early 1970s I observed two researchers with a large Spanish and English dictionary trying to understand a research paper in what they had thought was Spanish.

I glanced at it and said that it was not Spanish, but was Portuguese.

In astonishment in his voice, one of the researchers asked me "Do you speak Portuguese?"

I replied "No, but I am interested in printing and I know that that 'a' with that accent is used in Portuguese but not in Spanish."

As it happens some years previously I had seen in a catalogue for Riscatype, a brand name for a metal type foundry then based in Risca, South Wales, a list of the accented characters needed for various European languages and had studied it with some interest. I have later learned that the character is an 'a tilde'.

The accents used in the various languages are quite interesting. Some used in several languages, some in just one language.

The tilde accent in just a few languages, the caron in just a few languages

William

 

 

[v_kyr]

23 hours ago, MikeK36 said:

... I use windows character map to select, copy and paste accented letters into my text.

This doesn't work with AD - I don't want to go and change Language because of spell check etc - is there a workaround?

Try an UTF-8 based character map instead and make sure the selected font in use has and thus supports those characters then.