Special Characters

[Cindy Skillman]

I don't know if this is a bug, but whenever I use a combining accent mark, (grave combining acute tone accent, Cambria), it's as though I hit enter. Adding the accent causes (apparently) a return to be entered. I tried several other special characters and they all worked the same. Is this normal? It's not a big deal, but rather inconvenient.

Thanks!

[AmberV]

How are you inserting characters? I just tried the Alt-# (like Alt-0225 for á) method as well as Meta+mark+letter (such as Meta-i-a to produce â, or Meta-e-a for á) methods and they just insert characters like normal, one after the other.

[Cindy Skillman]

I've been using the character map select, copy, and then pasting them. So, I guess I'm kind of dumb here. The accent I've been using is U+0341. So I just tried alt u 0341 and that got me a capital U. Then I tried pressing and holding u and adding in 0341, but the key is too sensitive. I can't avoid uuuuuuuu. Even when I managed it, I didn't get the character. And what is meta? And where would you find this "mark?"

Sorry; I'm old, you know.

[AmberV]

Sorry, I used the wrong term, the key is actually AltGr, technically, but you won’t find it printed on the keyboard in most cases. The AltGr key is usually the Alt key on the right side of the spacebar. It’s a two-step process: you hold down AltGr-Something to choose an accent type, and then you let go and then type in the letter you wish to accent. You can access a bunch of common symbols this way, some of them directly, like AltGr-c for the © symbol. Getting used to these will probably be easier than hunting through font tables, with a bit of practice.

I do believe you need to select the International keyboard variant for any of this to work, so if you use US normally, US-International, from "Region and Language" Control Panel. This is just a setting you can change on the fly that adds the AltGr key combos, it is designed to work with standard keyboards.

Here is more information from Wikipedia.

Now that I’ve tried the character map method, I do see what you mean. If I just select one character and “Copy” it, when I paste it seems to include a carriage return. That may just be how it works, because I tested it using a method that completely skips Scrivener and got the same result:

1. Opened “Character Map” from the Start menu.
2. Double-clicked á to select it.
3. Clicked Copy.
4. Launched WordPad and pasted into the new document.

Oddly, if you select two characters in Character Map at once, this doesn't happen.

[JJSlote]

Easiest way I've found to insert a combining accent mark in Scrivener is as follows:

1. In Character Map advanced view, enter the Unicode value of the accent mark you're most likely to use. Click on that character, so you see the enlarged view.

2. Return to Scrivener, and enter your text with unaccented characters. As many or as few as you'd like, as you'll be adding accents after the fact.

3. Back in Character Map, hover your cursor over the enlarged image of the selected accent until you see the bubble message that identifies it. Then drag and drop that character into Scrivener, just to the right of the character you wish to accent.

charmap3.png (61.48 KiB) Viewed 2575 times

Rgds -- Jerome

[Cindy Skillman]

Thanks Amber and Jerome. I appreciate your help. My fault for choosing weird names for my elves.

[AmberV]

Oh! For names, have you tried using the auto-complete feature in Scrivener yet? You can add things like proper names to the list in the Project/Auto-Complete List... window. Then you might want to go into your Corrections settings and disable “In script mode only”. You can also add words to the list by selecting them and right-clicking, to choose “Add Selection to Auto-Complete List”.

Of course for names that start with an accented character, you'll still have to key it in, but for those that don't, that could save a lot of time.

[Cindy Skillman]

That sounds great, Amber! I added a bunch of names, but I don't think the auto-complete function is turned on. I've looked through all the settings I could find (and found some cool things I hadn't noticed before) but I'm not finding the "corrections settings." It seems like I did run across them before once, but where should I look?

[AmberV]

All program settings are in the Tools/Options... menu (or `F12`); you’ll find the Corrections tab there. The setting you’re looking for is in the top-right area. Even without the automatic feature turned on you can still request a completion at any point with Alt-=.

[Cindy Skillman]

Great! I did see this, yesterday, but do you think I could find it again? Thank you so much! This is going to help a LOT.

[BethCutter]

You know, if I had character names that required inserting 'weird' characters all the time, I think I'd temporarily rename them to Joe and Mary and such. And then do a s&r to the real names, perhaps at the end of each writing session, perhaps not until the entire story was done.

But then, I'm both lazy and a lousy typist.

[Cindy Skillman]

The auto-complete is working great, Beth. I'm delighted and I'm using it for all my "special" words, whether I've coined them, or they're just long words. Very cool! But strangely, the S&R didn't work when I tried it. It left out the special character. Strange, huh?