Portugese Letters on a Mac

[Bartleby]

Hi. Can someone tell me how I might type non English letters, like vowels with the accent mark on top etc. ?

B

[Bartleby]

And also, does anyone know how to turn a letter upside down?

[mira]

On a PC, you can install different regional keyboard layouts in order to type letters with diacritics. I have International Spanish, British English and American English installed on mine. I'm assuming you can do something similar on a Mac.

This might help: http://www.ehow.com/how_2065339_change-keyboard-language-mac-osx.html

You might have to do an image search to find out the Portuguese keyboard layout (there's probably a difference between European, Brasilian, African etc; accents are usually made by using Shift/Alt, hitting the appropriate diacritic key and then typing the letter).

Or if that sounds too fiddly, there should be an option in your word processing programme to insert 'special characters'. Most fonts will have characters with diacritics available. You can then copy and paste these into other programmes. They won't always transfer though, and that's why installing different keyboard layouts is a good option.

I'm not sure if numerical codes on the number pad work on a Mac or not, but on a PC, you can do ALT + number and get certain characters.

What letter are you trying to turn upside-down? Lower case 'e' to make a schwa? If so, it should be in 'special characters' in the word processor too.

I just re-read that and it sounds more confusing than helpful!! Please ask if you need some clarification :)

[talula]

On a mac, you can do this right from your keyboard.

Pressing the option key at the same time as the following letters, then letting go and pressing the letter over which you want the tilda, umlaut, etc., will place the character over the letter. E.g. ü = option + u, then let go and press u again.

opt + e (followed by whatever letter) = ´ (e.g. é, á)
opt + i = ˆ (e.g. â)
opt + n = ˜ (e.g. õ)
opt + c = ç
opt + ` = ` (e.g. à)
opt + shift + ? = ¿
opt + 1 = ¡

I'm more familiar with the Germanic languages, so I hope those are all the ones you would need for Portuguese.

To get to the character viewer, go to your edit menu and click on Special Characters (you'll also see a shortcut there to get to it). FYI, depending on your version of OS X, you can also go to your system preferences, click on language & text or international, click on input sources, and then click on character viewer, or choose different language keyboard layouts and have them appear in your menu bar above for you to choose whenever you please. I checked out the Portuguese layout, but I think you'd still need to do the method above to get most of the accents.

[Anne Lee]

On a PC go to
Start
All Programs
Accessories
System Tools
Character Map

When you click on a symbol, you can opt to either insert it or find the keyboard shortcut for it.