Rosie's Reviews

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
Last year, a reader posed a simple question to me: Is there an easy way to write French letters with diacritical marks? Using the Alt-0+[numerical code for the desired letter] has gotten very old, as has using that Character Map applet in Microsoft Word. I tried and tried to write a reply short enough for a tip, but the more I tried to condense it, the larger it grew. So here we are in
      Rosie's Reviews (where there is plenty of room): Let's just say I'm reviewing your options.
      If you very occasionally need to write a few documents in French, try the French-speaking version of the so-called soft keyboard on your computer screen. The problem is that a language- specific keyboard-soft or hard-has a very different layout. For example, the top row of letters for our standard U.S. English keyboards are QWERT-YUIOP, often called qwerty. In France, the top row of letters runs AZERT-YUIOP, of-ten called azerty. Within Microsoft Vista (and Windows 2000, 2003, and XP), the operating system provides software keyboards (and printouts of the keyboard layouts, so you can train yourself to touch-type in French).
      In Windows, go to Start, Control Panel, then Regional and Language Options. Your edition of Windows may change its phraseology, but you should be able to recognize the proper control panel applet. Under the general tab, click the Locations tab and choose, say, France. Under the Keyboards and Languages tab, click on Change Keyboards ... and pick your poison. You may install multiple languages, but after a few you may find the Windows language functions taking a time-out in the playroom. OK your way out, and you're on your own.
      If you like, click on the Properties button for an unprint-outable schema of where the keys are. You can, however, snap a screenshot of the keyboard and print that out. (For instructions on how to take a screenshot, see Tips & Tricks at left.)
      If you want to specify a French language Welcome screen-or Menu and Dialog boxes-you'll find those functions on the same Keyboards and Languages tab. Most European and Slavic languages usually install smoothly on your system. (Sometimes Asian languages, with the exception of Japanese, move beyond flakiness and into recalcitrant. Hold your breath.)
      So now your copy of Windows has cozied up to the French. But wait. When you go into Microsoft Word or Excel, all you get is English. Must not have worked, eh? Actually, you don't know whether it worked or not because you haven't yet told any of the Microsoft Office applications to add French to their job descriptions. To that end, open Word, the app with the greatest thirst for languages. In Vista, click on the Office button in the top left-hand corner of the page.
      To find out which languages (other than English) are already enabled on your computer, start Microsoft Word 2007 and click on the Office button (the button at the top-left corner of Word and the rest of the Office 2007 programs-looks sort of like the Start button but different). Find the Word Options button (on the lower right edge of the dialog box), make sure that Popular is highlighted in the navigation panel on the left, then click on the Language Settings button toward the bottom.
      You'll see two side-by-side dialog boxes. The left one lists all the possible languages you might install (Available Editing Languages). The right box lists all the languages you did install (Enabled Editing Languages). Don't worry about the possibilities for now; just make sure you need all the already-enabled languages. If you don't need one, highlight it and click on the Remove button. Repeat as needed.
      Now for thinning out the fonts, which is where your kilobytes and megabytes really add up. In Vista (this also works, with slightly different commands, in XP 2003 and 2000), go into Start, Control Panel. If the Control Panel comes up in Category mode, click Switch to Classic View, then into Fonts. One at a time, highlight the fonts you want to delete, then either right-click or press the Delete button on your keyboard to remove them from your system.
      The thing is, those of us who love type want to have as many pretty fonts as possible on their systems. Just suck it up, as I do once or twice a decade, and delete any fonts you haven't used in the past six months. Your computer will thank you.
     
     

---