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How to get foreign and phonetic symbols in Windows
Dr. Whitley, 531 Greene Hall,  (336) 758-5362,  whitley@wfu.edu

Students: print out this page for easier reference. (Revised 2009.)

To get foreign symbols in Windows applications, you can always pull down the "Insert" menu, choose "Insert Symbol," choose "normal text," click on the desired accented letter in the chart, then press "Insert," then "Close". This looks better (and is more accurate) than adding symbols by hand on a paper printout. But using the "Insert" menu is tedious for normal typing in a foreign language, and it's much faster to use keyboard shortcuts with the Ctrl and/or Alt keys. These shortcuts, shown below for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian, depend on which keyboard setting is currently active in the software. The default or "native" setting is probably English United States (also called United States 101 on older computers), but it can be reset to United States International as explained after the following chart.
 

	with "English U.S. (101)" layout	with "U.S. International" layout
á  acute accent (la tilde)	Ctrl + ' (apostrophe), release, then desired vowel	right-alt + desired vowel
à  grave accent	Ctrl + `, release, then desired vowel	` + desired vowel
â circumflex accent	Ctrl + Shift + 6, then desired vowel	Shift + 6, then desired vowel
ä umlaut or dieresis	Ctrl + Shift + ; (semicolon), release, then desired  vowel	shift  " + desired vowel
ç cedille	Ctrl + comma, then c or C	right-alt + , (comma)
ñ (la eñe)	Ctrl + Shift + ~ , then n or N	right-alt + n or N (Or use ~ (shift `) + n, N, or for Portuguese ã õ, + a, A, o, O
ß (German ess-tset)	Ctrl + Shift + 7, then s	right-alt + s
¿ (initial question mark)	Ctrl + Shift + Alt + /	right-alt + /
¡ (initial exclamation mark)	Ctrl + Shift + Alt + 1 (one)	right-alt + 1 (one)
Romance quote marks « »		right-alt + [ ]
euro €		right-alt 5
pound sterling £		right-alt $ (shift 4)

  What's the difference? Only the United States International keyboard setting gives you keyboard access to these symbols in programs such as Mozilla email, PowerPoint, Excel, and Dreamweaver. Spa. 111-154 students should note that this is also the setting that lets you type in Spanish at your textbooks' websites (even though that's not always stated there.) Note, too, that on recent Thinkpads some of the shortcuts given above for "English U.S." no longer work (the keystrokes were preempted for other commands), so you'll have to use U.S. International on these computers. U.S. International also requires fewer keys to be pressed down for the symbols. But it has two quirks to keep in mind: (1) unlike the English U.S. setting, it may override macros that you've created, and (2) in order to type a combination like "u (without getting ü) you have to press the space bar before the vowel.

  To find out which setting is active on your computer, and to change from one to the other, follow this procedure:

ThinkPad A21 and older computers

more recent ones with Windows XP

(1) On the desktop, double-click on "My Computer", and then on the Control Panel to open it. (2) Next, double-click on the Keyboard icon to open it. (3) Click on the Language tab at the top of the window. It should say "EN English United States." (4) Click on the Properties button, then on the down arrowhead (triangle) at the end of the layout box. (5) Select United States-International (or to go back, United States 101). (6) Click on Apply at the bottom of the Language window, then on OK. Close and leave the Control Panel.

(1) Open Regional and Language Options in Control Panel: to do this, click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click Regional and Language Options. (2) On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details. (3) Under Installed services, first check (scroll down) to see if U.S. International is already available for active use under "Keyboard." If it is, then skip to step 5. If it isn't, click Add. (4) Click on keyboard layout (Input Method Editor, IME), then pull down the menu (click on the down arrowhead), and in the list, click on United States International. (If you don't see it in this list, as in newest models, it's already activated as explained in stp 3.) Click OK. (5) Finally, add a "language bar": press the button "Language Bar", and check "Show language bar on desktop". (6) Click OK, OK, etc. until you're out of the Control Panel. At the top of your desktop, there should now be a "language bar"= keyboard toggle button (looks like a miniature keyboard) that lets you go back and forth between the two keyboard settings--"English (United States)" and "United States-International."

For Microsoft Vista: mostly the same procedure as Windows XP. Click on the Start button (lower left corner of screen), choose Control Panel, then Regional and Language Options. Next, select the Keyboards and Languages tab and click on Change Keyboards. You now see a menu titled Text Services and Input Languages: activate the General tab, and examine to see if US International is already installed or not. If not, click on Add. Scroll down the language listing to English (United States): click on it to show Keyboard, then click on United States-International so that its little box is checked. Click on OK. Now, again on the Text Services menu, click on the Language Bar tab and choose where you want the little on-screen toggle button for going back and forth between standard and international keyboards. I prefer “Docked in the Taskbar” so it doesn’t get lost or covered up. Then Click, OK, then OK, till you’re out of the Control Panel.
And yes, in our era of globalization, surely Microsoft could’ve made this simpler!

When following the above procedures for adding a keyboard layout, you'll note that Windows also offers you a list of foreign settings such as "Spanish" or "French." Those settings are for changing your keyboard to European layouts in which many characters, especially punctuation, are in a different position from our American "QWERTY" keyboard. For example, the "Spanish" keyboard makes the slash key, /, a hyphen and puts ñ on the semicolon key (and the semicolon on Shift + comma), their traditional positions in Spain. Most American users don't need to choose those foreign settings to type in these languages; "U.S. International" will let you do that just fine without changing everything around on the keyboard that Americans are used to.Your ThinkPad also comes loaded with fonts for Russian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc., but their keyboard layouts are so different from ours that you should see professors of these languages for how to use the special programs and settings needed for writing with them.

It is also useful to learn about your numberpad. You activate it on the ThinkPad by pressing Shift+NumLk (at the top of the keyboard next to "Print Screen"), then use the M JKL UIO 789 keys (note the small numbers written on those keys). The numberpad makes more symbols available to you. First, activate it as just explained, then hold down the (left) Alt key as you type in a special 4-digit number code, then release. (After getting the symbol, make sure you then deactivate the numberpad by pressing Shift+NumLk again before resuming normal typing). Examples of these characters with their numberpad codes:

— (dash): 0151	€ (euro) 0128	© (copyright) 0169	Ø (null) 0216
œ (oe digraph) 0156	£ (pound sterling) 0163	« » (Romance quotes) 0171 and 0187	÷ (divided by) 0247
¢ (cent) 0162	§ (section) 0167	° (degree) 0176	± (plus or minus) 0177

(These symbols are also available with the "Insert Symbol" procedure mentioned earlier.) See our departmental FAQ for  a fuller listing of such symbols and their codes.

TECHNICAL SYMBOLS, INCLUDING PHONETIC SYMBOLS
    For certain basic math and logic symbols and Greek letters, you can use the Symbol font: pull down the "Insert" menu, choose "Symbol," then on the resulting Symbols font chart click on the desired symbol and then on the Insert button. But the standard Symbol font is very limited; for anything beyond this meager assortment, you may need to install a specialty font. Many such fonts are commercially available for virtually any field or alphabet, but for phonetics, you can download an IPA font free of charge from the wonderful people at SIL International (see instructions in box below). After it's installed, you can just select it from your font list (normally showing "Times New Roman" on the Word tool bar) anytime that you want to type a phonetic transcription.
    In addition, recent computers now come loaded with fuller Unicode fonts that include many more symbols and foreign alphabets. Three that contain most symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet are Lucida Sans Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif, and Arial Unicode. To use these, pull down the "Insert" menu, choose "Symbol," and in the "font" window click on the little down-arrowhead to choose one of these fonts from the list. Then, you'll see a long, long chart of characters (including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Vietnamese...): scroll down through it till you find the one you want (clicking on "Subset" and choosing "IPA Extensions" may save you some time), click on it and then on the Insert button. (To add a diacritical mark such as accents, click next on one of the "Combining diacritical marks" and then Insert again, and it'll be correctly placed over or under the previous letter.) This "Insert Symbol" procedure from a Unicode font is convenient when you just need an occasional odd symbol, but for typing longer transcriptions or formulae it'll bebetter to have a phonetic font like that of SIL.

Instructions for the SIL font: Go to the SIL International site (click on this name to go) for a huge catalog of linguistics and language materials provided through this company. But for the free IPA font, go directly to this link: SIL IPA. At this writing (paths change sometimes), when you're on that page, click on SIL IPA 93, and on the next page, click on SIL IPA 93 Homepage, and there, scroll down to DOWNLOAD. Read the note there, and then click on the download button. The font should download into the folder you indicate on your computer (make a note of where, so you can locate it). After the download, go to that folder and double-click on the silipa icon (it's an exe file) to launch it. This miniprogram installs the font in your system as well as providing useful reference documents.You actually receive three fonts, same symbols (in the same keyboard locations) but with a different typographical "look": Doulos (matches Times New Roman), Manuscript (matches Courier), and Sophia (matches Arial). See me for a listing of the symbols and where to find them on your keyboard.

Limitations of special fonts (at this writing): (1) Some email systems still can't handle symbols beyond the basic ASCII set. Others can, provided that the receiver also has that font (e.g. SIL IPA, or Arial Unicode) in his/her system. This latter condition also applies to filing systems such as BlackBoard; if the instructor has used special fonts such as SIL IPA, students will likewise need to install them in their own computer to read and print out the materials. (2) Most fonts (regular or special) are "TrueType"; they do not work with Adobe Acrobat (.pdf documents), which requires a different kind, "Type 1" fonts.

AND ON THE APPLE iPHONE...
The iPhone’s keyboard doesn’t show foreign characters directly, but they’re there. For variants of the Roman alphabet, hold down the main-character key (e.g., E for é, è, ê...) for a moment until a row of accented options appears, and slide your finger tip up and over the row to stop at the desired character. Then release.

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