Accents over French/Spanish letters InDesign

This is easy. In the Character dialog box settings in your workspace panel, click the three dots to open up "more options". Or go to Window>Type&Tables>Character. From there, you should see a language drop down selector on the left. Select your language. This enables language features from the keyboard. Often, it will be the `~ (top left on standard keyboard) or '" (adjacent to the enter key on a standard keyboard). You hit one of those and then the letter you want to accent.

I went to Word, typed the accented letter, then cut and pasted it into InDesign.

Hi,

If you work a lot with Spanish and French, my piece of advice is: Get a Spanish keyboard. Why? Because it's basically just an English-speaking keyboard with some keys changed and you'll have all the accented characters for Spanish AND French at hand.

Why not the French keyboard? Because it's not a QWERTY keyboard but an AZERTY one.

If you work with English, French and Spanish, this is the best option.

One caveat: If you plan to work with Portuguese as well, then you might prefer a Portuguese keyboard, not a Spanish or French ones.

Best whishes and happy New Year (typed with an Spanish keyboard)

You can use this script to enter accented characters:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/compose.html

If the font you're using contains the accented character that you want to enter, that character is used. Otherwise the script creates the character by combining the letter and the floating accent. Floating accents are almost always available in fonts, especially modern ones.

I'm using InDesign CC on a Mac, and there you go to TYPE and then select GLYPS. If you've already typed your character in INDD, such as an "e" for example, highlight it, and then go to the Glyphs chart, make sure the font you're using is showing up in the bottom window (mine says Minion Pro, for example), and then find the e with the accent in the panel, and click on it, and it should add the accent to your already-highlighted e in your INDD copy , like this - é. Good luck!

I thought you just bumped an old thread with a post of a solution that doesn't involve typing accents.

In your shoes, I might uinstall a French keyboard. Not hardware, mind you, but software. I'm not sitting at my Mac so I can't recall the precise steps but it's in the same menu area as the Character viewer. THis might not work for you because for all such keyboards you wind up needing to memorize that e.g. the backslash on your English-hardware keyboard has been replaced with the cedilla.

I even looked it up online to get the correct keystrokes for the correct direction and accent. I get the accent and then the letter. InDesign is not allowing me to have the accent over the letter. Is this something that broke in CS5 and just needs to be fixed?

Probably not. Can you tell us what keystroke(s) you're using, what operating system you're using, and what font you are using? InDesign CS5 is occasionally flaky about "combining accents" but if your font doesn't have the combining glyphs I think it simply won't work. I think.

Did you try to use the glyph panel? Or, you could switch temporarily to French or Spanish keyboard (system preferences on a Mac, I don't know how to do this on Windows).