Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have found the german character with umlaut, the two dots or colon on its side above a, e, o ,u in special characters. When writing a letter in German these "Umlaut characters" are to be used frequently and rather laborious to insert via special characters on a one by one basis. Is it possible to save these characters against function keys or by creation of a drop down menu.

additional information re above: Please note that Umlaut Characters are used both for capital and lower case letters. A a = Ä ä in similar fashion for E e, O o and U u

The easiest way is probably to use the United States (international) keyboard setting. In that case you can use the dead key " followed by a vowel to add the Umlaut to aA, oO and uU: äÄ öÖ üÜ. The Ringel-s ß is inserted with Alt Gr + s.

floris v wrote:The easiest way is probably to use the united States (international) keyboard

Even easier is to enable the German layout, äöüß will be available without any dead key.

esperantisto wrote:

floris v wrote:The easiest way is probably to use the united States (international) keyboard

Even easier is to enable the German layout, äöüß will be available without any dead key.

That is only true if you only type in German (and know the German keyboard layout by heart). If that layout differs much from the ASCII one (the Dutch does for much used keys like " ? and some others), it's a pain.

German keyboard layout:

First I would like to thank all who have replied so quickly to my query. I only need to write letters in German occasionally and therefore think changing my keyboard by enabling the German layout on the qwerty keyboard is too much of a chore. In MS Word I used a simple method of ALt + Shift and Colon before and then typed the letter to show a letter with an umlaut. It was a bit of a bother but doable.
If I used the american keyboard layout would it be possible to switch back to the English qwerty layout without too much fuss?

ewjack wrote:I only need to write letters in German occasionally and therefore think changing my keyboard by enabling the German layout on the qwerty keyboard is too much of a chore.

Perhaps you could check my posts here:

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=96854

There's also AX:

http://vulpeculox.net/ax/

and you can use this macro (to which you can assign shortcut keys) to insert the characters:

http://codesnippets.services.openoffice ... acter.snip

ewjack wrote:If I used the american keyboard layout would it be possible to switch back to the English qwerty layout without too much fuss?

I fail to understand what you mean under ‘English qwerty layout’. The US (International) layout is an English layout with the QWERTY arrangement of basic letter keys. It’s only difference is that some keys are used as ‘dead keys’, i. e. modifiers. Say, hitting ' won’t produce the ' sign straightforward, but when you hit a next, you get á.

Anyway, you should be able to engage any number of layouts and cycle through them using a simple key shortcut, but this depends on your operating system that you keep in top secret. Refer to a respective manual.