special font (letters)

How can I reach special letters like an e with trema (2 dots on top)?

if you are on Mac, do the following:
ALT-U, followed by the E (to get the ë) or followed by SHIFT-E to get the Ë
As a hint, ALT-U for Umlaut (will also produce ü ö ä and Ü Ö Ä)

That’s wonderful, thank you. And what about le cédille and all that other stuff?

On Mac, you can type Alt+c for a cedilla. You might find this page helpful.

I use Dorico on Windows. What is the easiest way to type special characters (ä, ö, ü etc) into Dorico lyrics? I tried Windows’ Alt+ codes but this doesn’t work. I can copy from the Windows character map and paste into a lyric syllable, but the rest of the text in that syllable gets deleted, so I then have to retype the letters around the special character.

On a PC at least, this aspect of typing lyrics (in German or other languages) is a bit of a nightmare.

Welcome to the forum @WalterP12 - You could try switching temporarily to a German keyboard layout (e.g. this link looks helpful) and becoming familiar with where the umlauted letters are, despite of course them not being represented on the physical keys of an English keyboard. I often do that myself, although on Mac - I have a German keyboard option set up so I can quickly switch between them.

Or, another option if you know the lyrics in advance: type out the lyrics in full in e.g. a text editor or word document with all the characters required, hyphenate the syllables, then copy and paste them into Dorico.

Hello,
for the " ë " the code is : hold the Alt (the left one) while writing 137 on the numerical pad and release :so ALT +137
You can see all the ascii code here:

Best regards
dup

Thank you so much, both Lillie and Dup, I see this was as much an issue with my lack of Windows knowledge as with Dorico :slight_smile:

On Windows, there is also an International English keyboard layout, which provides pretty easy access to all of the diacritics commonly used in European languages. You can find out how to enable it here.