Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have an elderly lady where I assist with computers. She's French and would like to write documents with the French accents. What is the easiest way for her to accomplish this?

Thanks,
Don

Hello,

If you have a US qwerty keyboard, you may want to choose the canadian keyboard layout.
Entering french (or other) accented letters is achieved by typing AltGr+accent then typing the letter. See red accents in the image.

HL

The lady has a laptop so a Canadian keyboard is not an option. How do you do this on a US keyboard?

DonF

It is not an additional physical keyboard, just an alternate keyboard setting for Windows, remapping a few keys to return different characters when pressed. You can switch back and forth between installed keyboard mappings with a keyboard shortcut.

For a US keyboard it is probably better to use the US/international keyboard mapping. It does not change any symbols, just makes it easier to type accented characters and requires a bit of retraining for a few special characters (apostrophe, quotation marks, etc.). See this Microsoft article for details.

I am in Ubuntu Linux but I find the English International ALTCR (with dead key) seems the best choice. Presumably, this is the equivalent of the MS keyboard layout Keme recommends.

Alternatively, if the lady learned to type on a French (France) keyboard she might want to use that keyboard layout assuming she is a "really good" touch typist.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key may be of assistance.

Thanks for all the information. I will take this under consideration.

DonF

After some more research I came up with the following that will work in OpenOffice.
I added an additional keyboard input language, US International.
After doing this, the keystrokes on the attached file work with Open Office.

Looks good though my Ubuntu keyboard for <b>English International ALTCr (with dead key) </b> does not use the same key combinations for all the accents.

For example ü is "Right Alt + t" however the <b>Right Alt</b> comes from me deliberately assigning it as the "dead key"