GUEST, Accentless Mrr asked some time ago (14-Jun-00 - 03:23 PM) about how to produce a couple of Hungarian accented letters in HTML or in Word. So far as I can tell, HTML is limited to the special (&) characters defined in the standard, but in Word, there is a method that will work (sort of).

The marks requested were a "LONG umlaut, not 2 dots but more like quotation marks that go over a letter, or 2 acute accents together on one letter," and a "single accent that is perfectly vertical."

I'm sure that Guest is either long gone, or has become someone we know and love, but in case he/she is still around, or if some others might want this information:

In Word, use can use an "equation" field, with the "overstrike" option ( \o) to place two characters "in the same space." In older versions of Word, it was very difficult to find the Help file information for fields. The easiest method was to "insert" a field, type a known field type into it, and hit F1.

For help on fields in older versions of Word: Type "Ctrl-F9, eq, F1" which will take you directly to help for the equation field.

Unfortunately, this no longer works in newer versions of Word, but in newer versions you can open help, select the "index" tab, and type "eq" in the "Find" box, and it will now take you to what you need, at least for this one particular kind of field.

When you type a Ctrl-F9, Word inserts a blank field, which looks like a pair of Curly Braces "{}". When you insert a field, you will usually be switched to "View Fields" mode, but this can depend on how your preferences are set up. You can switch back and forth between "View Fields" where you see the "code" inside the field, and "View Result" where you see what the field does, using Shift-F9. Depending on your version of Word, this may turn on View Fields for the entire document or only for fields within an area you have highlighted. This can be a little disconcerting until you learn what to expect.

Using a plain "Double Quote" for the long umlaut, keystrokes would be:
Ctrl-F9 eq \o (A,")
The result will look like { eq \o (A,") }, and your cursor will be "inside the field, right after the ")".
If you hit F9 ("Update Field") you will (usually) be switched back to View Result and will see an A with a " typed on top of it. If it doesn't change automatically, just hit Shift-F9. The straight "Single Quote" can be used in the same way for the second mark requested.

The last step is to "unlink" the field. With your cursor still in the field, or with the area that contains the field highlighted ("selected" is the uSoft term) do a Ctrl-Shift-F9. This will leave you with the two characters printed on top of each other.

Especially in newer versions of Word, the Autocorrect function will probably be turned on to put "curly quotes" in when you type either a " or a '. You can turn this option off (and probably should when your writing HTML?), but there is also the option to hit a Ctrl-Z immediately after typing the ", which will "undo" the autocorrect and leave you with the straight ones.

For more convential marks, Word lets you hold down Ctrl while you type the "mark" and puts that mark over the next character you type. This only works with certain marks, but is good for the acute and grave accents. Unfortunately, there isn't a "magic code" built in for the special marks requested.

There are additional things you can do to move the marks around to get them where you want them, but anyone interested can see the details in the Word Help files. If you really want a special symbol to look good, you may have to play with a little bit once. Once you get ONE, you can just copy it where you want it.

I know this sounds terribly complex, but when you get the keystrokes down, it's really quite simple.

"Ctrl-F9 eq \o (U,") F9 Ctrl-Shift-F9" isn't really that tough, to get a very special character, especially once you understand what the keystrokes mean.

Unfortunately, none of this works in HTML, and if you put these kinds of things in your HTML to post, they will
probably be something else when they show up here. - :-(

John