Accents over French/Spanish letters InDesign

[Daliah]

I have a French document with lots of accented letters. I was trying to type those letters with accents on them, but I was unable to. I know how, I've done it in the past. 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? Any ideas? I thought maybe this function was removed since now there is the handy Character Viewer at the top of the monitor. It is handy, but not convenient if you have a lot to type.

[jmlevy]

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).

[Eric Dumas]

Hi, it is the same on Windows. I have a French physical keyboard for that reason. It is not easy to switch between keybords. My 'fingers' struggle a bit.

I ended up using MS Word to type it all in French, ignoring 'accents', then select the whole text, make sure it is set to French and let the spell check fix it all for me. This was the quickest.

As the text (.docx) was linked to InDesign doc, it all synced nicely.

[Joel Cherney]

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.

[Daliah]

Well the font could very well be the issue, but I just tried with Minion Pro with the same problem. Font is DIN Pro. System is 10.6.8. CS5. Yeah, not sure I'd want to install a keyboard for one file. I guess it could be helpful to know about though. Usually I have 1 or 2 letters I need to put an accent on and Character Viewer work fine for that. Not super conveninet and the keyboard, but helpful, especially for those characters that you don't know.

Option + Shift + e then e again to get that accent on the e.

So you saw me on that old thread. I ran into it while looking for something to solve this issue. I had already resolved that issue, which for me wasn't an InDesign problem.

I opened the glyph window/panel, but that doesn't help with while typing. It is more convenient than Character Viewer I think.

[Daliah]

I saw this website yesterday, but apparently didn't follow the keycomands very well. I tried it again and it worked. User error. For some reason I put a shift in there when it was just  "option + e + letter to be accented".

http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codemac.html

[RockstarBruski]

Joel, thanks for that link as that led me to search for windows commands (I'm using a PC) and found Windows Alt Key Codes which worked for me

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

My whole job revolves around squeezing 40+ languages into InDesign, so I'm likely to reply to any post that is at all related to non-English stuff.

Minion Pro has an acute accent, which is what you get with option-shift-e, but it looks to me like Minion does not have a combining accent, which is what you'd need. Your method did not work for me with Minion Pro, but it does work with Times New Roman. (Note that I'm not not not suggesting that you use TNR in your layout, I just picked it because it's a font that I know everybody has that also contains combining accents.) But if you use your method to type an acute accent on a font that actually has a combining accent, and then select that combined e-plus-combining-acute glyph and change it to Minion Pro, then in the glyphs menu it'll show up as a precomposed e-with-acute. 

I handle a vast amount of Vietnamese text, so I run into this kind of issue all the time. You may want to look at this thread if you want to make your own special-character-input scripts, or maybe at this page of this book if you want to memorize all of the special-input key combos so you can specify e-with-acute and a-with-acute and whatever-with-cedilla directly, rather than trying to use combining accents. I think those instructions will work but I once again have to offer my at-work, no-Mac, I-didn't-test disclaimer.

[jag_512]

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!

[se527]

this a perfect solution! thank you!

[Eric Dumas]

After 'fixing' the first word using Glyphs, for very long text, I often copy the word corrected, past in a Find-Replace window to update the whole content. I hate fixing the same issue several times in a document.

[Peter Kahrel]

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.

[Gusgsm]

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)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

My solution for these things is a good macro keyboard with as many hard macro keys as can still be found. (They came out with 18, dwindled to 8-12, and now have sometimes as few as 4.)

I have found hardware keyboard macros to be a streamlining, time-saving, convenience tool beyond all others, for every conceivable human-input need. Including working with accented characters in all languages when I do such things.

[durandpro]

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

[jmlevy]

This thread is eleven years old... But if you are able to type an accented letter on Word, you should be able to do it in InDesign.