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How do you type those accented characters for non-English languages from an English-language (or QWERTY) keyboard? Here are some online resources.

If you need these characters only occasionally, you can use key caps on the Mac or character map on Windows. Note: Apple has discontinued the key caps function on newer Mac operating systems, but you can find alternatives in Apple discussion groups. Fair-and-balanced note for Windows: The Windows environment prefers the term international characters to accented characters.

This document from City College of San Francisco has good cheat sheets for typing accented characters in French, Spanish, Italian, and German on both Mac and Windows keyboards.

If you do a lot of typing in foreign languages from a QWERTY keyboard, a good option is to use a foreign-language keyboard layout. Here’s the official Microsoft page on activation of non-English language keyboards in Windows.

This page from Wellesley College contains a good guide for activating non-English language keyboards in both Windows and Mac environments. Some of the jump links don’t work; scroll down the page to see the text.

I hope you’ll find these resources helpful. Let me know if any of these links becomes outdated or if you have additional links to share.

Update Feb. 17, 2009: Reader Katsumi Inoue sent the following link for OpenSolaris. Petr Hruska of the Prague OpenSolaris Globalization Group wrote the blog posting Learning Chinese – How To Write Tones in Pinyin on OpenSolaris. Petr has also posted Switching Keyboards in OpenSolaris Using setxkbmap and Keyboard Shorcuts.

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