How do I add French accent marks ( á, à, è, é, û, ù, etc.)?

English
#1

How do I to add French accents marks ( à,á, â, è,é, î, ô, ù, etc. ) to my texts?

Where can I find access to accents to use on non-English words ?
#2

No help offered!

#4

That matter is not LibO -specific, it is rather an OS issue (which is yours?)

Since you’re asking specifically for French, I assume you aren’t a French user because, in this case, you would use “dead keys”, i.e. keys which do not generate characters by themselves but add a diacritic on the next character. When dead key is not a primary key (one with the diacritic marked on top), it is not always obvious to find them. Their location is often OS-specific and may have various locations when variants are offered.

It is not convenient to change keyboard layout through system software because you always look at the physical keyboard when you need an uncommon character (unless you affix small stickers on key side) even when you know where it is supposed to be with the alternate keyboard.

There are various OS utilities allowing you to discover what you can generate. The best I’ve ever seen ships with MacOS: it displays the keyboard on screen and updates when you press modifier keys. Under Linux, the workaround is to read the keyboard configuration in /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps (location may vary with distribution) ot to use an on-screen keyboard. No idea for Windows.

Of course, universal surrogate is Insert → Special Character but it involves leaving keyboard for mouse and clicking several times for every character. It is better to learn where the dead keys are hidden.

Using a French keyboard with OS-layout set to French under Linux, this is what I found (but I played with keyboard configuration):

  • precomposed characters with diacritics (shown on keys):

  • é (e + acute) on 2, É on 2 with CapsLock (or AltGr+Shift+2)

  • è (e + grave) on 7, È on 7 with CapsLock (or AltGr+Shift+7)

  • ç (c + cedilla) on 9, Ç on 9 with CapsLock (or AltGr+Shift+9)

  • à (a + grave) on 0, À on 0 with CapsLock (or AltGr+Shift+0)

  • ù (u + grave) on ù (right of M on middle alpha row), Ù on ù with CapsLock

  • precomposed characters with diacritics (not shown on keys)

  • æ (ligature a+e) on AltGr+A, Æ on AltGr+Shift+A

  • â (a+ circumflex) on AltGr+Z, Â on AltGr+Shift+Z (mnemo right of A, because already used)

  • ê (e+circumflex) on AltGr+R, Ê on AltGr+Shift+R (mnemo right of E, because already used for Euro sign)

  • û (u+circumflex) on AltGr+U, Û on AltGr+Shift+U

  • î (i+circumflex) on AltGr+I, Î on AltGr+Shift+I

  • œ (ligature o+e) on AltGr+O, Œ on AltGr+Shift+O

  • ô (o+circumflex) on AltGr+P, Ô on AltGr+Shift+P (mnemo right of O, because already used)

  • ä (a+dieresis) on AltGr+Q, Ä on AltGr+Shift+A (mnemo below A, because already used; don’t think it occurs in French)

  • ë (e+dieresis) on AltGr+D, Ë on AltGr+Shift+D (mnemo below E, because already used))

  • ü (u+dieresis) on AltGr+J, Ü on AltGr+Shift+J (mnemo below U, because already used))

  • ï (i+dieresis) on AltGr+K, Ï on AltGr+Shift+K (mnemo below I, because already used))

  • ö (o+dieresis) on AltGr+M, Ö on AltGr+Shift+M (mnemo below and right of O, because L which is below O used for LATIN * LETTER L WITH CARON, Slovak?)

  • ù (u+grave) on ù, Ù on AltGr+Shift+ù

  • dead keys, aka; “accents”:

  • acute as AltGr+ù followed by a vowel

  • grave as AltGr+* followed by a vowel

    No logical way to remember these two. Maybe, because international keyboard has a quote marking on the key for the latter.

  • circumflex as ^ followed by a vowel

  • dieresis as Shift+^ followed by a vowel

Note that not all combinations are valid in French, e.g. ó (o+acute) does not exist in French

There are many other possible characters from the keyboard but you asked for French.

There are also combinations with AltGr, Shift and others to generate non-dead glyphs, e.g. AltGr+7 directly gives a grave sign which does not behave as a diacritics.

The above list may not be the “official” one because I customised my keyboard when I had to write a lot in French.

#5

not convenient to change keyboard layout through system software

It is a matter of habit and skill. Changing layouts has an extra benefit: LO changes the text language accordingly. It is quite important when preparing multilingual documents to avoid all words underlined as misspelled only because the language is set incorrectly.

#6

I do that with styles so that it is completely under control. I don’t know if automatic language change is akin to direct formatting. In such case, unintended use of a French word in an English paragraph would not be detected. I personally disconnect text content and entry device. I am used to my keyboard layout and its eventual customisation: I don’t hesitate to create a new layout when I have a substantial amount of work. YMMV

#7

I do that with styles so that it is completely under control. I don’t know if automatic language change is akin to direct formatting. In such case, unintended use of a French word in an English paragraph would not be detected. I personally disconnect text content and entry device. I am used to my keyboard layout and its eventual customisation: I don’t hesitate to create a new layout when I have a substantial amount of work. YMMV

#8

Paragraph styles are great, but they won’t of much help if you need to use various languages within one paragraph.

unintended use of a French word in an English paragraph would not be detected

That’s where changing a layout has a benefit: when you switch from an English to a French layout (meaning, switch the input language), French words become, yes, French ones, not misspelled English.

#9

I have defined several character styles for that. Of course, it implies more manual editing to switch. One advantage is I can set foreground/background color to track foreign word while reviewing, which I can’t under direct formatting.
As our conversation proves, there are many ways in LO to achieve the same task. Everyone is free to define his own workflow and different experiences is a way to improve one’s work.

#3

From the top menu select Insert -> Special Character...

Also see this help page.

#10

The keyboard definition and setup is the function of the operating system, language and your individual overrides. On my linux-mint system you use the KEYBOARD command to simply define and control the use of the keyboard and the Alt-Gr function.

The Alt-Gr key on the right of the keyboard is designed to provide you with just this accent function combined with the keyboard definition in the operating system. This provides the keyboard with FOUR levels. Level 1 lowercase, level 2 uppercase, level 3 Alt-Gr + lowercase and level 4 Alr-Gr + shift.
On my linux-mint system you use the KEYBOARD command to define the keyboard layout, With my English-GB keyboard defined with extended Win-Keys, the Alt-Gr key gives you all the accents you requested such as ç,é è ố + € which you need in Europe.

You do not state the operating system you are using, the language and keyboards you have defined. On my system, I use a variety of languages and keyboards to test LibO. For example ENGLISH (UK with extended WinKey) , ditto ENGLISH (USA extended), FRENCH-French (AZERTY already has Alt-Gr defined) SWISS-German (QUERTZ with Alt-Gr)

You can of course use the INSERT SPECIAL CHARACTERS to add these accented characters. LibO 6.0 has extended this function usefully.

#11

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.