I try to be as accurate as possible when writing things in blogs and forums online. One of the problems I’ve always had has been typing accented letters correctly. English doesn’t really have any accented letters, but there are plenty of words you can use in an English sentence that do. Think words like “cliché”, “fiancé”, “français”, and “el niño”. Lots of people don’t bother figuring out how to type those characters and will just write “cliche” without the accent. Normally it doesn’t matter, and it sure is faster to just ignore it, but I really like to be as correct and accurate as possible.
The first time I remember learning how to actually get a computer to type those characters was back in high school French class. We were using some French teaching software and if you didn’t type the word in spelled correctly including the accent, it wouldn’t accept it. Back then, at least on Windows, the best way to do it across any program was to hold the “alt” key and then type in the number of the accent you wanted. I don’t know if those numbers were unicode (I don’t think they were), but this was a really arcane process. I still remember getting an “é” required holding “alt” and pressing “1” “3” “0”.
The good news is that Apple has your back if you want to be cool like me and type accented letters correctly. I knew that in iOS you could hold down a letter on the onscreen keyboard and any accented variations would pop up above the letter. Want an “é”? Just tap and hold the “e” key and you’ll get all the different possible accented “e” characters. That’s really easy, but I’m not typically doing a lot of typing on my iPad. I’m also pretty sure that my brother isn’t going to notice or care that I accurately spelled “cliché” in Messages.
In OSX the only way to type these accented characters used to be using a method that was similar to the arcane Windows method. Up until Mountain Lion you had to hold down “option” while pressing a letter indicating the type of accent you wanted and then typing the letter to be accented. So if you wanted “é” you would hold “option”+“e”, release both keys and press “e”. Gross! Fret no more though. If you have Mountain Lion or newer, you can simply hold down the “e” key just like on your iOS device. A little popup will show up with all of the available accented letters. While still holding the “e” key, press the number of the one you want! So easy!
Now when I want to tell someone that I’m listening to a new band called Moodoïd I can show off my sophistication by spelling it correctly with ease. Sadly, if you want to be even cooler and write foreign words using a different alphabet entirely, you have to add an international keyboard layout in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. Even that isn’t too hard though: маленькая собака электроника