Finding Accents on a Macintosh Anglo Keyboard
You probably know that you have several invisible keyboard layouts right at your fingertips. Not only do youhave lower and upper case, but you also have other characters you can produce by using combinations of ordinary keys with the OPTION key.
How are you going to remember all those combinations of key strokes? First of all, do not exaggerate the problem. There are only five key combinations to remember. You only have to remember the lower case characters, because we rarely use the accents with capital letters.
Secondly, remember the basic principal -- that you have to strike two keystrokes to type one accented character. If you hit only the accent, nothing will appear on you screen. You have to type the accent and then the vowel that goes under it before you can see the accented character.
Here's where the accents are:
accent grave -- OPTION plus ` (accent grave, the key at the top left corner of your keyboard looks as though it has an accent grave on the regular lower case keyboard, but it won't appear on top of the vowel unless you strike it with the OPTION key) followed by the vowel
accent aigüe -- OPTION plus e followed by the vowel
circumflex -- OPTION plus i followed by the vowel
tréma -- OPTION plus u followed by the vowel
The ç takes only one key stroke: OPTION plus c.
In case you forget, you can always find these and other "invisible" characters by choosing "Key Caps" in the Apple menu. This produces a keyboard map.
If you don't like the key combinations Apple has chosen, you can install different ones in Word or Word Perfect. You can also install a keyboard utility, Popchar Pro, downloadable at
This program will let you install a palette showing the characters which you select, and which you can click on to make them appear in your text.