Accented Text in Mac OSX – Part 1

As I’m sitting around this afternoon tweaking the look of this new blog, my wife hits me with the first question of the day. She needed to know how to put an accent on a letter on her blog. While I was sure it was possible on our Mac computers (or on Windows or Linux for that matter) I had never done it and did not know how.

I figured it was a good way to start writing myself if I simply share the solution I found, so here it is. I’ll add in a couple screen shots too to make it even easier. The procedure has been checked in OSX Leopard and Snow Leopard (10.5 and 10.6). I haven’t had a chance to check it in OSX Lion (10.7) yet but I suspect it will work without modification.

1. Open System Preferences. The easiest way to find the System Preferences application is to look in the Apple menu on the top left.
2. Select the International preferences. International preferences is at the top of the System Preferences pane.
   
3. Select Input Menu and scroll down the list of keyboard layouts until you reach the US layouts.
4. There should be at least two US layouts, the regular US layout and the US Extended layout. Make sure the US Extended layout is checked. You can uncheck the US default layout or leave it checked. If you leave it checked you will be able to toggle between keyboard layouts using a shortcut menu in the menu bar.
5. If you think you will regularly switch keyboard layouts you may want the check the Show input menu in menu bar box at the bottom of the preference pane. Checking that will show the keyboard layout currently active and it will allow you to open the Input Menu preference pane directly. If you have more than one keyboard layout active then you will also be able to toggle between the active layouts. The example image below only shows one active layout.
6. Close the System Preferences pane when you are done adjusting the settings. You will now be able to use keyboard shortcuts to add accent marks to text at least if the application and font supports it. I have not run into anything in OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard that doesn’t support the extended character set but I certainly have not tested every available application.