Holding key for accent won't work in InDesign (Mac)

[antimofarid]

On a Mac, if you hold down a letter a contextual menu appears above it with the various accent glyphs:

It's very handy when you work in languages that require them. Unfortunately, it seem to work everywhere except in Adobe software. If you hold down "a", you get aaaaaaaaaaa instead of that menu. I know about keyboard mapping, the glyph panel and Option-shortcuts --- what I'm trying to find out is if there's a way to activate that pop-up menu. It's really, really handy.

[Eric Dumas · Accepted solution]

I hold the Option key to get the 'accent' I need. But that does not cover all the characters, so I bought a French Keyboard.

It took some time to get used to it, especially swapping between QWERTY and AZERTY , then I got frustrated and I let the spell check do its job, that seemed the quickest.

The virtual keyboard, kept on the side is handy one as well.

[Sheena Kaul]

Hi there, 

I hope your issue has been resolved till now. If not, please let us know so that we can assist you further. 

Else please confirm if any of the suggestions above helped. 

Regards,

Sheena

[sujans55447335]

I have this same problem, and buying a keyboard just to type one character is not an option. What are some of the other methods we can use to solve this issue?

[jmlevy]

Use the glyph panel.

[Eric Dumas]

once I used Find/Replace approach on a long document. 

xyzchelle >> échelle

[todb92481561]

I'm trying to add an acute accent over the lowercase letter "c", but I can't find a way. The usual ALT e + letter doesn't work with c. Searching the Unicode in the glyph panel comes up with the wrong glyph.  Any ideas?

[jmlevy]

Did you try to use the glyph panel? Maybe it does not exist in the font you are using.

[marcv71081261]

Use the Option+ key functions. Option+e gives you the é,á,ú accents. It's two steps, you hit option+e, and it puts the accent there, then you hit the correct letter you want. So to get an é, you press Option+e, then hit the e key.

You use option+u for the ü, ö, ä. You use Option+n for ñ,ã, and so on. Try them out, there's a lot of shortcuts using option, or shift+option..

[vegestock]

I also find this fustrating and regularly have to use notepad to workaround the issue. I can get å using option + key. But none of the above solutions allow me to select these characters à, á, â, ä, æ, ã, ā. 

[davecourtemanche]

If the option combos listed by marcv aren't working, odds are your font doesn't have those characters. 
Option + i = â

Option + ` +à

[vegestock]

Thanks so much for for clarifying. I've spent some time looking for options and checking typefaces. Here is a list of what I have found to replace the alt characters (à, á, â, ä, æ, ã, ā) offered in macOS / Notepad.

Option e + a = á

Option i + a = â

Option u + a = ä

Option ’ = æ

Option n + a = ã

Any idea how to get à or ā? ā is the main one used in the Māori language that is costing me time.