Post by Johans Nidorino on Nov 14, 2007 11:56:12 GMT -5
Normally, computer users from English-speaking countries lack some characters that do appear in keyboards made mostly for French-, Portuguese-, Catalan-, Italian-, or Spanish-speaking users.
A Latin American- or Spanish-distribution keyboard facilitates the use of these characters by offering a larger number of keys, or by showing those characters in positions already occupied by other characters in English-distribuition keyboards. For example, ñ is located where an North American keyboard usually has a semicolon (;), and the semicolon is placed somewhere else (in the English position of <, and at the same time, < and > are located in left-handed exclusive keys). Vowels with accents are typed by hitting the accute accent key (´) (which won't actually type anything if pressed once), and then hitting the corresponding plain vowel key.
So, what should you do if you're typing and e-mail or school report in Spanish? Changing the settings of your keyboard can be accomplished by entering your operating system's control panel, but if you don't have a hardware-wise Spanish-language keyboard (and you don't know the position of such characters), then it would be useless.
Instead, I recommend using ASCII codes whenever you think it's necessary. How do you use them? Well, impressively, any keyboard can type any existing character (if available in the correct font) in a common operating system like Windows. All you have to do to type a foreign character is hold the ALT key, and then type a sequence of numbers by hitting keys from your numeric keyboard, and finally you release the ALT key.
This is a list of the most commonly used Spanish characters and their respective ASCII codes:
So, to type "á", you have to:
Try it out, and have fun with Spanish characters!
A Latin American- or Spanish-distribution keyboard facilitates the use of these characters by offering a larger number of keys, or by showing those characters in positions already occupied by other characters in English-distribuition keyboards. For example, ñ is located where an North American keyboard usually has a semicolon (;), and the semicolon is placed somewhere else (in the English position of <, and at the same time, < and > are located in left-handed exclusive keys). Vowels with accents are typed by hitting the accute accent key (´) (which won't actually type anything if pressed once), and then hitting the corresponding plain vowel key.
So, what should you do if you're typing and e-mail or school report in Spanish? Changing the settings of your keyboard can be accomplished by entering your operating system's control panel, but if you don't have a hardware-wise Spanish-language keyboard (and you don't know the position of such characters), then it would be useless.
Instead, I recommend using ASCII codes whenever you think it's necessary. How do you use them? Well, impressively, any keyboard can type any existing character (if available in the correct font) in a common operating system like Windows. All you have to do to type a foreign character is hold the ALT key, and then type a sequence of numbers by hitting keys from your numeric keyboard, and finally you release the ALT key.
This is a list of the most commonly used Spanish characters and their respective ASCII codes:
| Character | Code |
| á | 160 |
| é | 130 |
| í | 161 |
| ó | 162 |
| ú | 163 |
| ü | 0252 |
| ñ | 164 |
| Ñ | 165 |
| ¿ | 168 |
| ¡ | 173 |
| Á | 0193 |
| É | 0201 |
| Í | 0205 |
| Ó | 0211 |
| Ú | 0218 |
| Ü | 0220 |
So, to type "á", you have to:
- Press and hold ALT (not ALT Gr).
- Hit numeric "1".
- Hit numeric "6".
- Hit numeric "0".
- Release ALT.
Try it out, and have fun with Spanish characters!
