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I am able to get a diaeresis over a letter by Option+u (ë) and an acute accent by Option+e (é). Is there a keyboard shortcut to get both combined? So that the accent is over the letter with a diaeresis?

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3 Answers 3

Under "System Preferences" > "International" > "Input Menu" check "Character Palette". This will put a menu on the menu bar with an icon of the national flag of whatever keyboard layout you are using. From that menu, you can select "Show Character Palette" and you get a window that shows all of the characters that are legitimate Unicode.

To insert a Unicode character into a text field that accepts Unicode, set your insertion point and then either double-click the character in the palette, or select the character in the palette and then click the "Insert" button.

My description comes from a computer running Mac OS X 10.5, there may be other ways to do this, but this seems easy to remember.

Note -- my suggestion doesn't seem to solve your specific diaeresis+acute over 'e' question. The closest Unicode character I see is Macron+Acute over 'e'.

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I agree with David's closest guess -- it's Unicode 1E17: ḗ –  Doug Harris Feb 9 '10 at 21:11

Just found this website that has a good overview on how to insert "special" characters. http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codemacext.html

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Link is broken. Use symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codemacext.html –  user1433372 May 8 at 5:41
option-e + e => é option-u + e => ë option-` + e => è –  user1433372 May 8 at 5:57


From what I've seen it may be possible depending on your character set (see not on international system preference in the included link). The following has about as good a walk through about international characters as I've seen. Otherwise, I've not seen any way to do what you're asking.



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