Typing Special Characters on your PC or Mac

If you’ve ever tried to type an accent, in Spanish or Portuguese for instance, using a standard US keyboard, you know it can be frustrating. One solution to this problem is to change the keyboard layout to match another country, like the Latin American or Spain layouts. This brings its own set of problems since the keys will no longer match what you see on your keyboard.

Windows

An alternative is to use a special layout called the US International keyboard layout, available on all versions of Windows; it will allow you to enter accents with a US keyboard layout. Generally, it can be found in the language and regional settings section of the control panel where you add a keyboard to your existing setup. It’s a good idea to remove the standard US keyboard and set US International as your default, otherwise they have a tendency of switching when you move from one program to another. To type an acute accent (é or í), you would enter a single quote (‘) followed by the letter e or i. The disadvantage to the US International keyboard is when entering an apostrophe or quotation (‘ or “), since these are used for entering accents, you would need to press the spacebar immediately after to get just the apostrophe or quotation. To give you a better idea of how it works, see the two keyboard layouts below, the first is your standard US layout, the second is the US International layout.

standard keyboard
Figure 1 - US Standard Keyboard Layout

International keyboard
Figure 2 - US International Keyboard Layout

Mac

What if you have a Mac? If you’re using a Mac, there are two options. The first is to use a series of shortcut keys to enter accents, each of them involves first pressing the Option key. A list of those shortcuts is provided below for your convenience. The second option is to use a special utility that will add an option for the US International keyboard layout to the Mac. This utility will make you Mac keyboard behave the same way the US International Keyboard pictured above does. This utility can be found here: http://www.brockerhoff.net/usi/. Installation is not difficult, follow the instructions on the author’s site to install it, and remember to log out and back in again before using your new keyboard layout.

List of Mac Key Combinations
1. Acute accent: Option-e, for instance for á, you would press Option, then the letter e, followed by the letter a.
2. Cedilla (ç): Option-c.
3. Tilde(ñ or ã): Option-n, press the key combination, followed by the letter, for instance Option-n-a, will type the letter ã.
4. Circumflex (ê or î): Option-i.
5. Umlaut (ü or ö): Option-u.
6. Stroked o (ø): Option-o.
7. Inverted question mark (¿): Option-Shift-?.
8. Inverted exclamation point (¡): Option-1.

Note: for capital letters add shift to the above combinations as needed.