OpenOffice.org is a fantastic office suite for most translators. It’s free, it’s stable, it’s localized into many languages that the proprietary companies will never touch …there’s a lot to love. For a long time, the only feature of OO.o that I’ve found problematic (other than the fact that its macros are not compatible with Microsoft Office macros, and that’s not really OpenOffice’s fault) is the difficulty of inserting special characters such as accented letters. By default, OpenOffice requires you to go to Insert>Special Character and then insert the character of your choice if you want to type something that’s not on the keyboard.
To give Microsoft Office credit where credit is due, it has very simple keyboard shortcuts for inserting an accented letter. Even if you don’t translate into a language that makes copious use of accented letters, the keyboard shortcuts are still useful. For example although I translate exclusively into English I e-mail clients in French a good deal of the time, and although I’ve created an OpenOffice keyboard shortcut to pop up the Insert>Special Character dialog box, it still takes a lot of time and keystrokes to insert those letters when I’m typing in French.
There are a couple of workarounds for this issue. You can install a US International Keyboard layout and use it as needed. If you’re lazy, (I’m ashamed to admit how often I do this) you can save some time by copying the most commonly used accented letter (in French this would be é) and pasting it when you need it. Or (drum roll) you could check out this web page by Bill Hibbert, which includes an OpenOffice macro that will enable you to assign shortcuts to all sorts of special characters that use marks such as acute accent, circumflex accent, tilde, umlaut, inverted question mark, etc. Once you install this macro, you would for example type e’ and then a keyboard shortcut you assign, and the é would appear.
From reading this extremely helpful web page I am guessing that Bill Hibbert is not a translator? Why? Because this page is in a section of his website entitled “Boring Tech Stuff,” and I’m guessing that most translators who use OpenOffice will find Bill’s page nothing short of fascinating… Thanks, Bill!
Corinne,
I was going to write a description of how to do that on the Mac but it started to become an article in its own so I transfered it to my blog…
“Accented letters and other symbols on the Mac”
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com/2008/08/accented-letters-and-other-symbols-on.html
What I describe is how to do what you describe for (almost) any application on the Mac since the functions are system-wide.
Thank you for the article, it prompted me for a long over due update on my blog !
Hey again Corinne 🙂
Even though I also only translate into English, I use MS Office’s shortcuts for Mathematical symbols and Greek characters (for Maths/Physics related documents) a lot. This may explain why the macro was originally developed by Bill. Despite running Linux, I still use a virtual box so that I can use MS Office because of particular macros I need and some problems I’ve had in viewing Word documents the way they are seen in MS Word that I’ve been too lazy to investigate.
But I use OpenOffice for all non-work related typing so this macro will come in handy! I do quite hate resorting to copying and pasting a single character, but I too have been guilty of it…
Otherwise I specifically bought my laptop with a SPANISH keyboard printed on it. (Despite buying it in Ireland, Dell were happy to oblige). In all keyboards I’ve used, this one let’s you write the most European languages on it by default áèïñõ纷ô <– did all of that with no extra programming needed and from within any piece of software 🙂 Of course you don’t need the keyboard actually printed on the PC. You can just set it to Spanish, and even buy new sticky covers for your keys off ebay for whatever language you like to help you remember.
Thanks for the link! By the way, congratulations on getting in the top 100 Language Blogs!! 🙂 🙂
Hi
I’ve been pointed here by someone who found my macro via your blog and was kind enough to write and say thank you for it.
I’m not a professional translator, although have done a lot of French->English translation, and often work in the two languages together (I’m English living mostly in France). I developed the macro because my memory isn’t good enough to remember all the ALT,0 combinations needed to input even a modest set of special characters, and picking them off the special character menu is far too clumsy for frequent use.
The problem is a long-standing one in OO – these two bug reports, which were opened in 2002, give an idea of the history:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6847
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4579
The latter in particular should amuse – I post as redi2go there, and you can see how irritated I was getting around the middle of last year.
Having had the insight that there was a simple solution that nobody had spotted in five years of searching and done the work to develop and test it, I was then infuriated by the sheer impossibility of making it into an extension and putting it into a generally available library. My post on the 4579 bug of May 8th gives a pretty accurate view of my feelings on the matter!
I like my solution because it doesn’t need the mouse, it’s quick and intuitive to use, it has no practical limits on the number of special characters made available, and it’s easy to customise to key combinations that make sense to you.
Anyway, thought I’d just check in and say hello, and how pleased I am that this little piece of software is useful to somebody – I really thought it had sunk without trace!
I use Open Office for typing up my assignments for my Spanish course and have struggled with this issue. My slightly fiddly solution has been to type my assignments in the dialogue box offered on the writing section of this site:
http://www.lenguajero.com/write-in-spanish/
Then copy my text complete with inserted Spanish characters into my Open Office document. Only problem is, I have to be careful not to accidentally post my assignments on the Lenguajero site by mistake!
Obviously this is not suitable for all languages but perhaps other sites offer something similar?
thanks so much for posting this! i just switched from ms office to open office and was about to switch back if i couldn’t find a way to easily input non-english symbols. and of course thanks to bill for writing the extension!!
🙂
I’ve found that just installing the US International Keyboard layout is the easiest for using Portuguese (Brazilian) and English simultaneously; no different than Microsoft Office in this case.