I just discovered an easy way to type foreign characters on a Mac keyboard.
Just ignore this post if you know how to do it already.
If you have a Mac keyboard, you can hold the alt/option key and press on certain keys to get characters with diacritics and accents.
e.g. to get the accented “a” as used in Spanish, you first press the alt/option key + e. Then you let go of the keys you were holding and press ONLY the letter “a”. Voilà! There you have your Spanish á.
There’s a host of other things you can do.
u umlaut as in German → alt/option key + u; then press “u” on its own ==> ü
And if you want it to be a capital character, just hold shift as you press it the second time:
e.g. alt/option key + u; SHIFT key + u ==> Ü
And so on.
The following website has a list of everything you can do.
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/diacritics.html
I think this is much easier than using those numerical Unicode things…
And the other option I’ve found is online. It’s a website called www.typeit.org.
I’ve posted a thread about that one way back when…
Hope this’ll make typing in your target languages at least a little bit easier!