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		Introduction Writing systems   Western alphabets   Non-Western alphabets   Phonetic and offbeat   Varying glyphs   CJK   Miscellaneous Solutions   Types of fonts   Inserting single characters   Inserting diacritics: á, à, â, ä, ...   Keyboard layouts   Input methods   Multilingual browsing				In Windows, characters with diacritical marks (such as the letter "â") can be rendered in two ways: Option A: Use a ready-made character. -   Recommended uses: This is the standard procedure used for most languages. -   Requirements: You need a font that actually contains that character. This may be a Unicode font or a language-specific one-byte font (see above). For example, the Western font codepage includes characters such as â, ñ, é, etc. -   Input method: There are various methods available. For example, you can use a French keyboard layout and press a and the "dead key" ^ on your keyboard to get â. -   Behind the scenes: No matter how many keys you press, the resulting character is stored by Windows as a single character. Option B: Use a non-spacing diacritical mark. -   Recommended uses: This procedure allows you to add "odd" diacritical marks like the ones contained in phonetic alphabets. For instance, check the following IPA transcription of a word in Spanish: -   Requirements: You need a Unicode font that includes non-spacing diacritical marks. A good example is Lucida Sans Unicode (see here), which ships with Windows XP. -   Input method: You can use the Windows Character Map or VTrain's on-screen Virtual Keyboards for this purpose (see here). You type in a 'regular' (spacing) character (such as the letter "a") followed by a non-spacing character (such as "^"), and get a combined character (such as "â"). Of course, the resulting combined character is displayed as a single character (provided that the editor or viewer you use behaves properly). -   Behind the scenes: Keep in mind that the resulting character is stored by Windows as two characters (or more, in case you combine several diacritical marks).  For this reason, non-spacing characters are not suitable for common text edition, since most search engines will fail to find words containing non-spacing characters. For more information about diacritical marks in Unicode, check out the Unicode.org FAQ . Check out Mike Colley's font collection .
		Updated: 2023 January 16 Legal notice.				Copyright © 1999-2024 by The authors. All rights reserved. Our homepage is http://www.vtrain.net