How does one decide which method to use? Every method has its defenders. At the FLRC, the International English Keyboard is used frequently by those who are used to the qwerty keyboard, while the specific language keyboards are useful to those who are familiar with them. For those who only write papers, fans of MS Word enjoy its simplicity while those who need maximum flexibility prefer Corel WordPerfect. And the ALT keycodes or the Character Map can save the day when nothing else works. 

Some links below are to commercial sites; this is not intended as an endorsement. This site primarily covers Windows 95. Windows 98 and NT have similar capabilities but the details may vary slightly.

• Change/add Keyboard
• International English Keyboard (for a combination of Western European accent marks)
• Other European Keyboards
• Alt key
• Character Map

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• Change or add Keyboards
• Microsoft Windows 95/98 allows  a number of different keyboard languages and layouts. Installation of the "typical", or "default" options provides capabilities for French, Spanish, and other Western European languages. 

 
• To change the keyboard languages and layout, click the Start button, then choose Settings, Control Panel, and Keyboard. Click the Language tab. Add a language and give it properties - one of which is the US-International English keyboard (see below). Use Apply to finish the process; the Windows installation CD is usually needed. More info is at Duke's site.  Also the keyboard and multilanguage sections in Start - Help provide details.

 
• Keyboards for many languages are available. However, they usually do not follow the "qwerty" layout and some characters will not correspond to those printed on your keys. Once the languages are installed, using alt+shift or a designated variation rotates through them. Checking the Enable Indicator On Taskbar puts the default language on the taskbar. Click the taskbar language icon to switch to another language. 

 
• The US-International English keyboard layout is installed as above (choose English as the language and US-International as the layout) and has these features:
• It uses the following intuitive method which works with most (or even all) Windows applications, while keeping the familiar qwerty keyboard.

 
• To use, press one of the five punctuation keys ` ' " ~ ^ , then the letter to be modified.

( ' then a = á,   " then u = ü, ' then c = ç, etc. ) 
 
• right alt key  + another key
right alt + , = ç  (or  ' + c) 
            + ? = ¿ 
            + ! = ¡ 
            + c = © 
            + q = ä 
            + e  = é 
plus many others
• note that this maintains the "qwerty" layout. However, each punctuation key ` ' " ~ ^ must be followed by the space bar if it is actually intended. The system is smart enough to accept words requiring an apostrophe, such as it's, without the space bar.

 
• To install the US-International English keyboard layout, in addition to United States English, one can fool the system by adding an unused language, such as Icelandic, and changing its layout to the US-International in the language properties of the keyboard/control panel.

 
• To create documents in a Central European, Cyrillic, Baltic, Greek, or Turkish-based language requires a computer with Multilanguage Support. Open Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, click Windows Setup, the Multilanguage Support check box, and details. Check the desired languages and click OK twice. The Windows 95 installation CD is needed.The changes will take effect after the computer is restarted.

• Alt key
• Those who use only a few characters, but often and in many software applications, may prefer to keep the default United States English keyboard and memorize a few Alt key combos. This method uses the Alt key plus a four digit number entered via the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The modified letter appears after the keys are pressed and released. For touch-typers, the disadvantage is having to move their hands to the number pad on the right of the keyboard. Examples follow (Figure 2); or see charts of other combinations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this works in every program, even in email and filenames.

• ALT + 0224 = à        ALT + 0225 = á
• ALT + 0232 = è        ALT + 0233 = é         ALT + 0200 = È
• ALT + 0242 = ò        ALT + 0243 = ó         ALT + 0241 = ñ
• Character Map
• This is useful for the infrequent accent or symbol. It is located at Start - Programs - Accessories - Character Map (OR click Start, Run, and type charmap). After choosing a font, double click the desired character(s). After clicking Copy, return to your document and paste. The font called Directions MT provides arrows and symbols. This system fails if a particular combination of keystrokes, as seen in the lower right of the window, has been reserved for another application.

1. Press CTRL and one of the punctuation keys ` ' , ~ : ^ that most closely resembles the accent needed. 
2. Release the two keys pressed in Step 1. 
3. Press the letter to be modified and the accented character will appear. 
Thus Ctrl+: with u gives ü and Ctrl+, with C gives Ç. 
For example (from MS Word help/index/characters/inserting/type international):

Other international features are described in help/index/characters/international. Supplemental dictionaries and proofing tools are available from Alki Software Corporation. MS Office 2000, to be released in mid-1999, is reported to automatically detect the language you type and intelligently use proofing tools (like Spelling and Grammar checker and AutoCorrect) in the correct language. Academic pricing of Word 2000. 

Not all fonts include all characters. Each character has an "address" which is helpful for repeated use of a rarely used character. 

Tips on characters,fonts, spelling 

This also works for features, keystrokes, applications, or macros. 

Or
Use the International English keyboard above.

If writing directly in HTML code, the tags for special characters are relatively intuitive, with  > < and & as special keys. Examples are &ouml; for ö, &Ouml; for Ö, &ntilde; for ñ, &egrave; for è, and &eacute; for é (see chart for more). Other characters are &lt; for < (less than), &gt; for > (greater than), &nbsp; for non-breaking space, and &copy; for ©. The ampersand itself is represented by &amp; (note that a semi-colon is at the end of these tags).The shareware application NoteTab provides another method as well as other useful features . Or try Tips 'n Tricks.  Here is a list of HTML numerical codes.

• Other languages, by Fingertip Software.
• Hebrew  and Yiddish Software
• Japanese handwriting practice/recognition page  (stroke order, direction of the stroke, placement)
• J-text, a Japanese word processor for Windows using the standard English keyboard
• Laurel Mittenthal's  non-Roman fonts  (annotated list of mostly shareware for both Macintosh and PC) and Computing in Non-Roman-Font Languages ("computing" includes email, PDF, word-processing, and Second Language Teaching & Learning which integrate computer and multi-media technology). 
• The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup: standardized multilingual single-byte coded (8bit) graphic character sets for writing in alphabetic languages.
• Thai font info 
• DownLoad Vietnamese Fonts - VISCII
• IME input methods 

• Lingomail - supports email in 30 languages
• DIACRIT Shareware - the language dependent, diacritical character key map for Windows by Paul Herber.
• NoteTab  - the clipbook library and the pasteboard are incredible time savers whether you create web pages, write source code, send e-mail, take notes, analyze text, read files, or do anything related to text. Price is between free and $20 depending on the version and features. A staff favorite at our Center!

• Overview of European Diacritics by John Hudson (A truly comprehensive site)
• Colby Jackie Tanner's charts and discussion
• Furman chart for the  ALT key with the three-digit number
• Middlebury  David Herren and the Mac
• SUNY Cortland comments and an image of the International English keyboard
• Tips 'n Tricks  Primarily info on HTML  and JavaScript.
• Warwick Bruce Ingraham's detailed discussion
• David Wilson 's summary of user preferences, based on  polling language teachers via the Linguanet discussion group. The topics are Alt Codes, ALT Key, Toolbar, Keyboard Remapping, Shortcut Key, Insert Symbol, Personal Preferences, and What We Teach Students.
• Characters and symbols available as transparent GIFs (scientific)
• Andrew Starr's International Page
• Products 

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• An introduction to using non-English languages on the net, written by a non-specialist, for the semi-literate computer user.
• Internet Mail Consortium Report: MAIL-I18N IMCR-010, August 1, 1998
• Byte: Transborder Tips and Traps (1994 but useful intro to localization)
• Duke University Guides to Foreign Language Characters in Email, Pine,Unix
• Glossary of Computer Oriented Abbreviations and Acronyms and COUNTRY DOMAIN NAMES
• Internationalization / Localization (World Wide Web Consortium)
• MultiLingual Computing & Technology: started in 1987 as a directory of software that supported other languages and now calls itself the largest and leading magazine in the world for the industry.
• Unicode is the universal character encoding standard used for representation of text for computer processing.
• Zinc Application Framework uses global architecture  to support the use of many languages.