How to get accents on your keyboard

Dun wrote: »

Upper case accented letters are not normally shown in french. So école is written Ecole in upper case.

They may not be normally shown, but properly they are. The reason they aren't (or at least what I've read) is that on old typewriters there was barely room for all the normal accents, and there was no room at all for capitalised variants.

Maybe the above is wrong, but I know for a fact that the official way (per L'Académie Française) is to always have accents on letters which is why things like Word 2007 have an option to force them (since normal French keyboards still don't have keys for capitalised versions)

I personally use dead keys though (e.g. you get a dead key for cedilla when you push "Ctrl + Alt + COMMA (,)"

Hi guys,

Look no further, this is the ultimate tool:
http://french.typeit.org/

You can type your text in there and then paste it somewhere else. It's quick and easy.
Read the note on the right handside.

Pour ceux qui cherchent comment taper les accents français, cliquez sur le lien. Si vous l'ouvrez dans Internet Explorer ce sera encore plus facile (lire la description à gauche).

Apple Mac keyboard accents

é (alt + e)
í (alt + i)
ó (alt + o)
ú (alt + u)
á (alt + a)

Ç (alt + c + c)
æ (alt + ')
œ (alt + q)
ë (alt + 8 + e) you can then just use other vowels to get the same effect.
â (alt + 6 + a) you can then just use other vowels to get the same effect.

« and » (alt + \ and shift + alt + \) you sometimes see these symbols used as quotation marks when reading news articles and other compositions.


Voilà!

The English Extended keyboard seems to be very handy for accents.
See: http://french.about.com/od/writing/ss/typeaccents_3.htm