Re: French accents

[Graham Norton]

Dear All,

iMac TeXShop MACROS give another way of inserting non-standard  
characters into LilyPond lyrics  without using unicodes explicitly (my  
version of TeXShop will not allow me to insert characters directly  
from the Special Character table into a file).


Firstly,

In System Preferences > International, you can  select the language/s  
you wish to use. If you click on your standard flag in the top menu  
bar, you will see a box of the languages you have selected with a tick  
next to the current one.

Clicking e.g. French  in this box changes your ENTIRE keyboard layout:  
thus 2 is é, 9 is ç and so on. But this is treacherous:  s2 would  
become sé, the letter q has now become an a and so on.

So this needs a lot of care (if you are not going to use \char ##x  
whatever),  as you will have e.g.  a's where you wanted q's etc.  
Basically, a very impractical method.

Better, in TeXShop > Macros, open the Macro editor and create macros  
agrave, eacute, cedilla, ihat etc.

The new macros you create will appear under the Macros button in the  
menu at the top of your current file. So you can just click on e.g.  
ehat from your file Macro button and it will insert ê at the cursor.  
LilyPond prints these as intended, even without changing the encoding  
from Mac Roman to UTF-8.

(You can even name the macro as ê, but then you will get an italicized  
ê when you put ê in the content box!)

[To use the Macro editor, select New Item, and enter ehat in the Name  
box. In the Content box, insert ê (from the Special Character table or  
by changing the language to French, holding down the option key and  
typing e. Likewise for any other special characters.]

This approach can be used to insert any special characters by clicking  
on the corresponding macro you have created and avoids changing the  
keyboard or  entering special characters  directly (if you can).


Graham

PS. The only French character that appeared from holding the option  
key on the standard keyboard is ç from option c.


On 04/08/2009, at 6:59 AM, James E. Bailey wrote:

> On 02.08.2009, at 15:06, Graham Norton wrote:
>
> > Dear All,
> >
> > The Unicodes are available from TeXShop > Edit > Special Characters  
> > (in MaC OS).
> >
> >  Just select a character and let the mouse hover over it. (A total  
> > of 2820 glyphs can be obtained this way.)
> >
> > Here is a table of special French characters obtained in this way:
> >
> > character       Unicode
> >
> > é                       00E9
> >
> > è                       00E8
> >
> > ê                       00EA
> >
> > î                       00EE
> >
> > ç                       00E7
> >
> > à                       00E0
> >
> > ô                       00F4
> >
> > For instance,
> >
> > \markup{ \concat{ B  \char ##x00E9 caud } }
> >
> > in lyrics gives Bécaud  in LilyPond output (from TeXShop input), as  
> > per the Notation Reference 3.3.3.
> >
> > Incidentally, TeXShop produces this output even without changing  
> > TeXShop > Preferences > Encoding to UTF-8.
> >
> > Graham
> >
> > PS I think it would be useful if the doc in Notation Reference  
> > 3.3.3 said something about how to obtain the unicodes (for users  
> > who are not using a UTF-8 supported edito)r.
>
>
>
> If you're on a macintosh, this is an extremely long way to do this.  
> The faster way is to hold down option, the modifier, and then the  
> character. For example, é is option-e-e and è is option-`-e. These  
> can all be seen in the keyboard viewer, which can be accessed from  
> System Preferences in the Input Menu of the International preferences.
>
> Also, if you're on a macintosh, your editor supports UTF-8.
>
> James E. Bailey