| 45254 |
Typing accents and other international characters:
There was a question on another board about how to type characters with accents in our messages. I told him that I¡¦d answer his question here, just in case someone else has the same question, because this would be the best board to look on for such an answer. I hope this document is helpful to Patrick, and to whoever else might have this question.
If you have MS-Word, open the ¡§Symbol¡¨ command on the ¡§Insert¡¨ menu. The Symbol window will show you all of the most common international characters. You can either type your message in MS Word, inserting international symbols as needed from this Insert / Symbol window, cutting and pasting your completed message into Language Exchange¡¦s create message window, or you can note down the Alt- key codes for the characters you¡¦ll want to use, as they appear here in the symbol insert window. Once you have the alt-key code for the symbol you want, you can manually enter it in either in MS-Word, or in any other application, such as Language Exchange message create. To do this, just hold down the alt key while you type all four characters of the alt code (be sure and add as many zeros to the beginning of the code number as it takes to make four digits. When you release the Alt key after entering the four-digit key code, your special character will appear.
When using ¡§insert / symbol,¡¨ it¡¦s important to remember that only the basic character sets, like Times New Roman, or Ariel will work reliably in Language Exchange create message. The more sophisticated language sets such as Times New Roman Special G1 or Wingdings contain characters that are not supported by Language Exchange, and will appear as an unprintable character: „Ð
There are exceptions to this. For example, Amazon, in message 45033, has entered some wonderful Japanese and Chinese characters. I posted a message asking her how she managed that, and I¡¦m still waiting to hear back.
If you like to type your messages in Word and then cut and paste them into create message afterwards, there are some more convenient shortcuts for typing these international characters. To get these shortcuts, Use the office assistant to search for the phrase, ¡§keyboard shortcuts for international characters¡¨ This will bring up a list of all of the most commonly used international characters, along with the keyboard shortcuts that will create them. These shortcuts are very easy to remember and pretty easy to use.
I hope some of you find this helpful. See you on the boards!
Mark Spinger
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; English
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| 45324 |
Unprintable quotes and apostrophes
My message number 45254 taught me an interesting lesson:
If you choose to edit your messages in MS Word and cut and paste them into mylanguageexchange, be sure to watch out for quotation marks. MS word uses very pretty quotation marks that slant left and right so that they look better in your document. But like the Z with a tail character, it's outside the basic character set, and as you will have seen, they don't print correctly on the bulletin board. I needed to go back in and convert all of those fancy characters back into regular " " and ' ' quote marks and apostrophes.
In case you were wondering about that, and in case you want to know how to avoid it...
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA.
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Language pair: English; English
This is a reply to message # 45254
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