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When followed by d or D, creates the old English character "eth"Īdds a grave accent to the character typed nextĪdds a circumflex to the character typed nextĪdds a dieresis or umlaut to the character typed a degree symbol above the letters a and A used primarily in Danish, Norwegian, and SwedishĬreates combination or Germanic characters based on the character typed nextĪdds a cedilla to the character typed nextĪdds a slash through the letters o and O used primarily in Danish and Norwegian There are a number of these shortcuts, as shown here: ShortcutĪdds an acute accent to the character typed next For instance, to create the e in resume, you would type Ctrl+' (an apostrophe) and then type the e. Essentially, the shortcut consists of holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the accent mark that appears as part of the foreign character, and then pressing the character that appears under the accent mark.
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Word does include a set of handy shortcuts for creating foreign characters. In fact, Microsoft has already included several such words in AutoCorrect-for instance, if you type souffle you get souffle or if you type touche you get touche. You can use it for other words that do not have a similar spelling in English. For instance, you wouldn't want to set up AutoCorrect to convert all instances of resume to resume, since both variations are words in their own right. This works great for some words, and not so great for others. While this approach is possible, it can quickly become tedious if you use quite a few special characters in your writing.Īnother possible approach is to use the AutoCorrect feature of Word. One way is to choose Symbol from the Insert menu, and then look for the character you need. There are multiple ways to insert foreign characters. What you are doing is using a single character from a foreign language-the e character is a single character, not a compound character. The first thing to remember is that you are not creating some kind of "compound character" that is composed of a regular character and an accent mark. For instance, words that are of French descent (such as resume) may require an accent over some of the vowels to be technically correct. If English is your native language, you may periodically have a need to type something that contains a character that doesn't appear in the English alphabet.
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