david klufas wrote:
I'm a new user of openoffice, am using Vista and a standard English keyboard, 
and although most compositions are in English I want to send letters using 
Spanish accents.
I don't understand how to use a keyboard shortcut of some sort to insert any of those Spanish characters. Going to insert, special characters, etc, etc every time we wish to insert one of the characters in incredibly slow and cumbersome. I'm sure there is an easy answer but don't understand what U+00BF for an upside down question mark (for example) means.
Thanks in advance for any reply.

David Klufas
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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First you need the *decimal* values of the characters you need to insert. Your "00BF" is *hexadecimal* for the decimal value 191. Knowing this, hold down the Alt key and then, using the *numeric pad* on your keyboard press 0191 in sequence. When you release the Alt key an upside down question mark will appear on the screen at the cursor position. Note that you *must* use the numeric key pad and *not* the usual number keys above the top row of letters. This will almost certainly mean having to turn Numlock on. Note too the leading zero - simply entering 191 will not work. Please note that this is a Windows (Opertaing System) thing; as such it has nothing to do with OpenOffice

The "U+" in your example stands for Unicode which is a modern extension of Ascii designed to handle many additional characters including European vowels, accented characters & punctuation marks as well as other alphabets such as Cyrillic, Greek and so on.

For further reading, go to http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/cumming/WordForLinguists/Unicode.htm

Having solved the Windows issue, we can now turn our attention to OpenOffice. In OpenOffice you can record and save a "macro" for each character. You can then assign a "keyboard shortcut" to each macro. For example I recorded a macro to enter Alt/0191. I named the macro "InvertedQuery" and then assigned it to Ctrl/q. Now when I hold down the Ctrl key and hit the letter "q", an inverted question mark appears.

For more information, see Writer's Help about recording macros and assigning them to shortcut keys. See also http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php and http://www.ooomacros.org/


--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to users@openoffice.org

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