Entering spanish characters
I offered a comment (that was in response to anothe comment) on a recent post and thought that it might be good to post this as a "question". Probably most users of this forum are aware of this but, this might be useful to some.
There are several ways to enter spanish characters on a computer. Probably the simplest and one that I use a lot is to enter the characters as ASCII code. This is done by holding down the Alt key and entering numbers on the number keypad (Num Lock must be on). The characters are entered with the following Alt-Num combinations: á - Alt-160. é = Alt-130, í - Alt-161, ñ - Alt-164, ú - Alt-163, ¿ - Alt-168, ¡ - Alt-173, É - Alt-0201. There are other combinations for other capital letters but I have never had occasion to use any accented capital letter other than É/ There are other ASCII combinations that do the same thing but with more key strokes. This, incidentally, is a bother on laptops without a separate number keypad because you have to constantly switch the keyboard from normal to number keypad with the function key. I believe the procedure is somewhat different on a Mac but, you can find that on the internet easily enough. If you use spanish characters a lot there are other methods that involve reconfiguring your keyboard. If you use an English keyboard, one is to change the keyboard to English-International. In Windows this in done in Control Panel - Clock, Language, Region-->Change Keyboards. Then the special characters are entered by striking the single apostrophe key and then the English letter key that you want to be the special spanish letter. For example. for ñ you would strike the apostrophe key and then n. With this configuration, you must strike the apostrophe key and then the space bar if you want the single apostrophe.
5 Answers
Many, of us write in both English and spanish all the time, even within the same document so a way of entering spanish characters on an English keyboard is a necessity. One thing I find kind of fascinating is that Microsoft Word will automatically switch the proofing language between Engilsih and spanish depending on which language I am using. However, it cannot keep up with two languages in the same document very well.
I always used to lose my crib sheet so I have tried two other options at different times.
1) Bring up the Character Map onto the desktop and use that. It can be found by going to Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Character Map and this gets easier the second or third time. But the Character Map is not totaly intuitive and needs about 4 clicks to get a letter installed so:
2) Use the facilities in SpanDic. More complicated than it sounds but you can select any one of the accented or other characters to the Answer box, highlight and copy it (ctrl-X is quickest - it copies and deletes at the same time so you're ready for the next one) then paste it where you need it (guess what ctrl-V is quickest).
3) There is, of course, the third option of having a spare Spanish keyboard and changing your language choice but this is not very helpful when you're keying in your English versions or comments.
and now 4) Make up a teeny table of all the extra characters you may want in Excel or even a text file. You can do this with any of the methods we have jointly described. Then keep it on your desktop where you can copy what you need from it. For comments it has the advantage, compared with using the local facility, that you can flick from SD to your crib table and back instead of often lengthy scrollings up and down.
This is a very interesting way of writing Spanish on a keyboard if you are a mathamatician with lots of time, but I can assure you this is not how it is done in the real world. If a Spaniard buys a laptop in England and takes it home, he will simply enter Spanish as either a default or optional language in "regional languages" through the control panel and have done with it. And there is always the option of buying a Spanish keyboard.
I have a Spanish keyboard, but I haven´t used it in years because it´s easier to just memorize on the English keyboard the few letter differences and the location of Spanish punctuation marks.
I have different keyboards in Windows and switch back and forth between them via a hot key or a pull down menu on the bottom task bar.
There is not enough space in the comment field to reply to JulianChivi's question so I am using the answer mode so that anyone else interested can read this. I use Word 2010 and in this version, the proofing language is set through the language button under the Review tab on the ribbon. There are several varieties of the spanish language. For someone like yourself who is communicating with people around the world you would probably want to select the international or modern sort (depending on the version of word). In earlier versions of Word, this is accomplished under Tools/Language. I think that when you select a language, it is downloaded from Microsoft. The original installation of Word probably would not have all of the perhaps hundreds of languages. In Word 2010 once you have both the English and spanish languages loaded, the program figures out which one you are writing in and sets the proofing language accordingly. I am not sure how the earlier versions handle this since I have been using 2010 since I started formally studying spanish. (I used the Pimsleur approach for a while before I enrolled in spanish at the university.) I hope this helps. If this does not quite get you there just enter something like "how to proofread in spanish in Word (add version)" in a search engine such as Google. Salud.
