Diacritical Marks

Here in Arizona we are fairly close to México where the native language is español. You may wish to sprinkle an occasional foreign word in your documents from time to time, and diacritical marks can completely change the meaning of a word. In Spanish it is imperative to refer to your dad as papá and not papa, which means potato. Most word processors have a means of inserting special characters like this. In WordPerfect you can press Ctrl-W or click Insert|Character to get a selection that will not only include accents but whole alphabets in Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese. You can hunt through the lists until you stumble on the one you want and insert it. The ASCII character set included accents and some other useful characters like ½ in the range above 127. To insert a á in your text in any program and any font you simply need to hold down the Alt key and enter 160 on the keypad. ¡Now you can write about El Niño properly!

The problem is that it is not easy to remember the appropriate number for all the characters, so I have written a tiny program that produces a popup menu. It is called ASC.EXE. Make a shortcut to it on your desktop, and give it a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-Shift-A, a blank icon, and rename the shortcut simply dot. It is practically invisible on the desktop. With Power Toys you can also remove the little arrow. To make the blank icon in Paint, enter a dot and surround it with a little box. Call it asc.bmp, then rename it asc.ico. Now you can enter Ctrl-Shift-A from anywhere and see the popup menu, press a key or click the chart to exit, and press on. I found that it unfortunately left me frozen in WordPerfect after accessing the popup, so I also had to press Alt-Tab to get unstuck.

If you would like to try it click to download now. It's a freeby from me.