Lately I’ve been working a fair bit with lyrics in French and Spanish, which require some diacritical characters like “e” with a " ` ", etc. Not available easily with an English language keyboard, so I’ve built my work-around by setting a variety of foreign language keyboards on my Mac OS which I can switch to and enter the necessary character with a click in the keyboard viewer (equivalent to character viewer in windows). Maybe paragraph styles would be a better approach, but I just haven’t got that to work for me yet.
Current issue is an accented letter that doesn’t appear to exist on the French keyboard: the kinda upside down “v” accent over the letter “e”, as in the French noun “reve” (dream). I’ve tried a variety of fonts and keyboard setups like French Spanish German Croatian Swahili and whatever to no avail.
I’m an english speaking Canadian with a ham-fisted knowledge of french, but maybe there are Dorico folks in Europe that know where this character exists.
Diacriticals for most European languages have been available on Mac since 1984. The “upside down v” is a circumflex accent. To obtain it, press opt-i before the vowel on which it will be placed. For example, to obtain the ê in rêve, press opt-i then e. This applies on an English keyboard layout. It might be different on other keyboard layouts.
As shown above, just holding the letter down gives you a range of options, and you just press the number that you want. This is borrowed from iOS.
However, from the late 80s onwards, on an English keyboard, you could use Option + letter to ‘load’ an accent before the next letter. So Option + u will give you an umlaut on the next letter. e gives you an ecute accent. i gives you a circumflex. ` gives you a grave accent.
I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t type rêve on a French keyboard.
There’s also apps like PopChar, which let you browse the full range of glyphs in a font and paste it into the text cursor.
I do have to object to designating non-English orthography as a ‘really geeky’ subject. French and Spanish together account for over half a billion native speakers worldwide, and without diacritics you simply can’t spell these languages (or many, many others) correctly. They are not an optional add-on just for nerds.
That said, one trick I’ve occasionally used for languages with more uncommon letters that even this iOS trick doesn’t let you type is to just have a browser tab open with the Wikipedia page for [Language] alphabet and copy/paste the individual characters from there into the Edit Line of Lyrics window.
I think he might have been expecting to have to memorize a key code or escape character sequence since it wasn’t coming up for him with the others. That part would be geeky, but not as much as the computer professor I had who would then proceed to explain what ESC actually means and where it originated.
