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>>> Item number 206, dated 96/04/01 22:44:32 -- ALL

Date:         Mon, 1 Apr 1996 22:44:32 -0600
From:         lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu
Subject:      Diacritical marks

The following is not a historical question, but information on the subject may be of interest to many in our group.

David Morgan of Wesleyan University <dmorgan@MAIL.WESLEYAN.EDU> writes:

As a relatively new subscriber to the list I may be raising a question that has passed through the list before. It's a technical matter: Does anybody know how to get Microsoft Word to do East European accent marks? The program as shipped can fairly readily do the accents needed for Western languages, but I can't find the ones needed for Polish, Czech, Magyar, and so on. Is there perhaps an add-in available from some source? WordPerfect will do these marks, but it would be great to be able to spell Walesa, Capek, and Petofi the way their countrymen spell them without having to change word processors for the purpose!

=> WorldFont for Windows, a product of DatCal Corp., is said to work with both Microsoft Word and WordPerfect; I recently acquired it and can state that it does interface with the Word program on my pc. It appears to support all the Latin alphabet characters with diacriticals as well as several non-Latin character sets. Perhaps members more experienced with the program than I am can corroborate its usefulness.---JPN

>>> Item number 207, dated 96/04/02 09:58:13 -- ALL

Date:         Tue, 2 Apr 1996 09:58:13 EST
From:         charlie <INGRAO@vm.cc.purdue.edu>
Subject:      Re: Diacritical marks
In-Reply-To:  Message of Mon, 1 Apr 1996 22:44:32 -0600 from
              <lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu>

Assuming that you use MS-DOS, you can instruct your IBM-compatible to employ a different "code page" that will enable you to reproduce Slavic and Magyar characters, while still retaining the more common German and Latin diacriticals. I have gotten the best choice by having my PC emulate a Czech keyboard (identified by the letters CZ) and Code Page #852. This combination covers all of the Habsburg alphabets.

There is one remaining problem, however: whereas your screen will now faithfully reproduce all of the desired characters, your American-made printer will likely be unable to do so without the help of supplemental software that employs "true-type fonts" (which instruct the printer to print the Slavic, Magyar, etc. characters as graphics characters).

>>> Item number 208, dated 96/04/02 15:14:09 -- ALL

Date:         Tue, 2 Apr 1996 15:14:09 -0600
From:         "GARY W. SHANAFELT, MCMURRY UNIVERSITY" <GSHAN@MCM.ACU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Diacritical marks

I'm not familiar with Word. Word Perfect 6 for Windows uses its own Truetype fonts with the foreign letters you want; it then switches them in depending on the character you selected. What you need is a TrueType font (or fonts) that have the characters that you want. Once installed, these will both display properly on your screen and print on your printer. Most TrueType fonts are in 8-bit format: that is, they give you characters 33-255 (as opposed to 7-bit, which are characters 33-127). 33-127 are the characters you actually see on a standard PC keyboard; 128-255 are non-standard ASCII characters with diacritics, various symbols, etc. Most TrueType fonts I've ever seen, though, give you only Western European letters and diacritics in that 128-255 code range: French, German, Italian, but not, say, Czech or Polish. You might try printing out the characters 128-255 of the fonts you have to see if they include the characters you want. Normally, you can get a non-keyboard code by holding down the ALT key and then tyyping the relevent code number from the numeric keypad.

I still use mainly the old-style bitmapped font format; when I wanted a non-standard letter, I just added it to the font with a font editor. But that may be more work than you want (or need). You might check the Web for sources of foreign letter sets; I believe I came across some once but didn't bother to save the address because they were nothing I needed. Look under Desktop Publishing (DTP) and then, under that, Fonts.

Good luck!

Gary Shanafelt

>>> Item number 210, dated 96/04/02 20:41:32 -- ALL

Date:         Tue, 2 Apr 1996 20:41:32 -0600
From:         lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu
Subject:      Re: Diacritical marks

Here are three additional posts on this subject. The first is from John-Paul Himka of the University of Alberta <john-paul.himka@UAlberta.CA>:

I have used "Superscript," but cannot recommend it. It gets all the diacriticals, but it's cumbersome to use (you'd hate to type a letter in Polish on it), the letters don't match other fonts well and if you change fonts or translate your text from Mac to DOS you end up with gobs of gobbledy-gook.

=> Dan Pinkerton, Center for Austrian Studies <danpink@gold.tc.umn.edu>:

Regarding diacritical marks for both PCs and Macs: Monotype makes a series of "EFO" fonts which work for a number of eastern European languages. It's available as part of their Monotype 5.0 CD or on diskette, and there are several serif and sans-serif fonts to choose from (we use Times New Roman EFO as the body type for the Austrian Studies Newsletter). They're in Chicago, and the toll-free number is 800-666-6897.

=> Gale Stokes, Rice University <gstokes@ruf.rice.edu>:

If anyone is still using Wordstar in DOS, as I am (version 7.0), there is a program available that will print all diacritical marks needed for Slavic or any other European language. If anyone is interested, I will search around and see if I can still find the supplier. One advantage of Wordstar compared to Word Perfect (at least as I understand Word Perfect) is the easy of manipulating footnotes, which is why I never switched.

>>> Item number 211, dated 96/04/03 15:13:00 -- ALL

Date:         Wed, 3 Apr 1996 15:13:00 -0600
From:         lijpn@pegasus.acs.ttu.edu
Subject:      Re: Diacritical marks

Here are two more contributions.

=> Timo Olkkonen of the University of Jyvaeskylae <timiol@tukki.jyu.fi>:

At least in Word 7.0. you can choose the diacritical marks and copy them as separate letters under the "Add" "Symbol" (if the letters are supplied with your software as is in the case with Win- 95: there you can find the Greek and Russian Cyrillic letters as well). However this is slow and you can make a shortcut by assigning a "hot- key" for each letter under an "CTRL", "ALT" or "SHIFT"- key, for example "ALT F1". I had a huge problem of writing the Finnish ae (a with two dots on it) in Hungary, where I had to learn the ASCII- system of using "ALT" and a set of numbers. However there are many possible variables and I would be interested if somebody knows where to find a list of codes relating to the usage of "ALT" and numbers.

=> Paul Douglas Lockhart, Wright State University <PLOCKHAR@desire.wright.edu>:

Most of the difficulties presented by diacritical marks can be avoided by using Nota Bene, if you don't mind switching word processors. After all, it's designed by academics for academics, unlike Word or WordPerfect. Besides the tremendous flexibility it offers in footnoting, bibliography management, and note-taking and manipulation, with its Lingua package it allows easy use of virtually every imaginable character in European languages. I regularly use it for work in the Scandinavian languages, including Icelandic. Moreover, it allows on-screen use of other alphabets, including (but not limited to) Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic. I'm rather surprised that more academics have not made use of Nota Bene; after all, Word, Word Perfect, and even Word Star are basically business applications.

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