type language marks using portable

Hello,

I have an Inspiron 6000 and was wondering the same thing. The alt+keys do not work, but today I was typing and made accents accidentally happen with key combinatons twice, and I have no clue how I did it. I type in French a lot, so i can do it in Word with the "insert symbol" function, but that gets tiresome.

There has to be a way and it is not in the manual--- !

--Kim

 

 

 

If you go to Control Panel, select Regional and Language Options. Then select the Languages Tab, then click on Details button. Under "Installed services" you can see what keyboard layouts are loaded up on your system. Different countries have different keyboard layouts even if they speak the same language! Like USA and United Kingdom. I am in Ireland and I am using the setting English (Ireland). With that setting I can easily pick accents by pressing "Ctrl" and "Alt" and any vowel (Or "Alt Gr" and any vowel).If you are using a US keyboard you wont be able to use Ireland or United Kingdom settings permanently because some characters like @ and ~ are in different places, but if you like you could try using it temporarily some thing like this:

From the same menu, if you add English (Ireland) (or English (United Kingdom) or whatever language) then go down to Preferences underneath. Click on language bar button and then check the box beside Show the language bar on the desktop. Then click OK and for all the previous menus. The language bar should have appeared in the top left corner of you desktop. If you click on the minimize bar (its a very small black line just above a small black triangle) the language will "go down to" the far right of the Task bar and depending on the language you have chosen will probably be shown by two the capital letters EN.

As you type if you need an accented character right click over the letters EN then click on the language you want to use. This will set the key board to that language. And you can use then click on the EN again and switch your key board back.

Check out Wikipedia article on Us and Uk keyboard differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards and international keyboards at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout.