They can be a wee bit laggy at times, but the important thing is they work!
Even better, it is an GPL licenced tool, so it’s free! We installed it and after adding a whole collection of French keyboard shortcuts, it works a treat! We can now open a Google Doc, or any other application, and the shortcuts work nicely.
Unfortunately, TextExpander is only for the Mac.Ī quick search using turned up this article from LifeHacker which mentioned a Windows alternative called Texter. Something like that might solve the problem… if we could have a system-wide keyboard shortcut that took a set of simple user-defined keystrokes like a` and converted them to à, would solve the problem nicely.
Once you define your shortcuts you just type those few keys and the text expands out to reveal the full version of the text… so, for example, a shortcut such as “ilu” could be defined to expand out as “I love you”, and be implemented at the system level and therefore work using ANY application on the computer.
The Mac, on the other hand, handles the text input for characters at the operating system level, not the application level… which is far more sensible.Īh ha! The penny dropped… If that’s the case, maybe we just need to get something like TextExpander, a neat tool for the Mac that allows you to create customised, system-wide keyboard shortcuts. As it turns out, the fact that we used to be able to use Windows keyboard shortcuts for these characters in Office applications, but now not in GoogleDocs, had nothing at all to do with the change to GoogleDocs… it seems that the Windows shortcuts won’t work in ANY environment outside of Microsoft’s own Office tools. The problem has to be with the way the text input to Google Docs is being implemented within Windows itself.
Hang on… if the Mac can type these characters into the Google Doc, then it can’t be a problem with Google Docs. I tried it on a nearby Mac and yes, of course it worked… right there in my open Google Doc! Alex Guenther replied to say that it worked fine and it was really easy on a Mac, just type Option + the letter. Then I tweeted about it, asking if anyone had a solution to the problem of typing these diacritical marks. The fact that Google Docs was so crippled in this regard was very annoying. I could not seriously expect a user to go to all this hassle just to type a single character, and in any piece of French text there were likely to be many of these characters needed. That’s 8 or 9 keystrokes to type a single character! Hardly an elegant solution.īoth of these “solutions” were unacceptable to me. Given that almost our entire school userbase uses laptop computers, this would have involved typing Funtion+NumLock to turn the numeric keypad on, then holding down Alt while typing the 3 or 4 digit code, then typing Function + NumLock again to turn the regular keyboard back on. Apart from being an extremely engineering focused solution rather than a user experience focused one, the Alt Codes only worked when using the numbers on the numeric keypad of a keyboard, and not when using the numbers from the top row of the keyboard.
Technique 2: Use Alt Codes... basically you hold down the Alt key and type the 3 or 4 digit code for the character you want. Not only is this method really messy and cumbersome, it doesn’t solve the problem of typing a message in Gmail, where inserting special characters is not an option. Technique 1: Use the Insert > Special Characters option in Docs.
“If Google Docs is ever to be a credible alternative to Office, they really need to fix this!”Īfter Googling around for a solution, the suggested workarounds were (in my opinion) unsatisfactory from a user perspective (and hence me taking the time to write this blog post… hopefully this might be helpful to someone else trying to solve the same problem). Lots of people were complaining about the poor diacritical mark support in Google Docs. Searching for a solution online revealed that we were not the only ones who were struggling with this issue. “It’s ridiculous that Google Docs can’t do such basic things when it’s so easy in Word and Outlook” was the general consensus. Prior to the move to Google, our language teachers knew all the various keyboard shortcuts to enter these characters into a program like Word or Outlook, and life was good.Īfter the move to Gmail and Docs however, these same keyboard shortcuts no longer worked, making the potential move to Google Docs seem like a bad idea for language teaching. French, for example, uses accented characters like é, è, ç, å and so on. We teach several different languages here at PLC Sydney and many of them requires the use of special characters. After our recent move to the Google cloud and all the services within it like Docs and Gmail, our Languages department have had to face a few new challenges.