Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Diacritics with an external iPad keyboard

With a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, you just hold down a key to get a display of characters with diacritics. With an external iPad keyboard, diacritics are not especially intuitive. The Option key (⌥) is key. Briefly:

⌥ + E, followed by letter: acute accent

⌥ + `, followed by letter: grave accent

⌥ + I, followed by letter: circumflex

⌥ + N, followed by letter: tilde

⌥ + U, followed by letter: umlaut

⌥ + C: cedilla
Thus déjà vu, fête, mañana, Mädchen, garçon.

The key combination that needs glossing is ⌥ + `, which uses the sadly neglected accent that sits below the tilde in the upper-left corner of the keyboard. Yes, it might be mistaken for a single quotation mark.

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