foreign language accents

[gal1057]

I would like to know if anyone can help me I have VideoStudio X8 and I can not type spanish letters in my titles using the alt key in windows 7, is there any way of doing this, your help will be greatly appreciated

[BrianCee]

This can usually be achieved by copying using Ctrl+C from any programme on your computer which can display Spanish characters and then pasting using Ctrl+V into the VideoStudio preview window - AFTER you have "double clicked to add title"

you can copy a sentence or more at a time.

[tanguero]

If it's a one-time thing for a couple of titles, yes, copy and paste is easiest. Otherwise, install the US International Keyboard on your system once and for all from Control Panel. You can toggle between that keyboard and US English easily when you're not typing Spanish (and have US English be default). With that keyboard active, you type 'e for é, ~n for ñ, "u for ü, etc. And it's built into the OS, so works with all applications (and yes, works with VS titles too). You DON'T want to choose Spanish keyboard since that will assume a different key layout than what you have on your keyboard--US International is the one you want (assume your native keyboard is a US English one).

[Ken Berry]

Sorry but I have always used a US International keyboard, but cannot get VS to recognise either the way you suggest or the more correct way of holding down the Ctrl button when you hit ' then e to get é; or Ctrl + Shift when you hit ~ then n to get ñ; and so on. Nor does VS appear to recognise the Alt + Hex codes e.g. Alt+0233 (on the numerical keypad) to get é... So I just use the method already described by Brian...

[tanguero]

The Alt-key combination is application dependent (works on about half my applications), but the US International Keyboard should not be (works on all of mine including Corel VS, on Windows XP at least).

Make sure you don't have some third-party utility instead of the built-in Windows one for International keyboards. Ctrl is not part of the sequence for the built-in one (and it's an extra keystroke besides), so I'm guessing you're using something else. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/306560 which also says nothing about using the Ctrl key (and indeed mine does nothing if you include the Ctrl key).

There are also additional right-Alt shortcuts with the International keyboard, including rAlt-5 for € (if you don't already have it on your default keyboard), rAlt-1 for ¡ and rAlt-/ for ¿.

[Ken Berry]

Well I never!! I had never noticed that there was a separate US International keyboard available. As I said, I have always accepted the Windows installation of the US keyboard and had thought this was what you were talking about. I have Windows 8.1 on this computer so the suggested fixes in that Microsoft link you provided did not work. But going to Control Panel > Language allowed me to fiddle around with it and install the option of the separate US International keyboard layout, which I can control from the keyboard icon which now appears in my task bar (and which can be changed via the Windows key+Spacebar).

More importantly, I can confirm that this works as you suggested in Video Studio titles. That's quite a discovery for me as I use French, Spanish and Portuguese quite regularly, and had gotten used to the various work-arounds mentioned above.

So a big thank you!!

[tanguero]

You're welcome! The link at http://www.forlang.wsu.edu/help/keyboards1.asp has a very good list of all the goodies you get with the US International keyboard. Works well for French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian and German (rAlt-s gives you ß). For Spanish, you get the bonus rAlt-aeiouy to get áéíóúü, which is even faster. A small tradeoff is that you have to type an extra space sometimes (if you really wanted to type "e" with the quotes and the space after, you'd have to type "<space>e"<space>,<space>), but one gets used to that quickly enough.

There are a couple of letters used in Scandinavian languages (øå) too, but I don't know enough of those languages to know if this is comprehensive enough. Beyond that (many Eastern European languages) this stops working and you need a more language-specific keyboard and the appropriate fonts installed, or to use the character-map utility (e.g., for characters like Ł, Ş, ž, etc. as they are Unicode and outside the 8-bit ANSI encoding, and you have to have these characters available in the font in addition, which you probably don't for most of the decorative fonts used in VS Titles). For more than you probably ever wanted to know about all this (though it's interesting geeky reading), check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

[Ken Berry]

Thanks. I already knew about the limitations when you delve into Eastern European and other languages. But I seldom if ever use them, and when I do it is usually in Word where I simply then resort to the character map method. I have to change the font of course when I use (very occasionally) Cyrillic (as I speak Russian but seldom need to write it, though coincidentally when I need it, it is usually for titles in VS!!)

[asik1]

Will you guys make a short test for me?
Can you type any of those characters in menus in the DVD module of VS ? do they show correctly?

[Ken Berry]

asik -- as I said above:

More importantly, I can confirm that this works as you suggested in Video Studio titles.

I tried it with all those Western European accent marks and they worked!! Much to my surprise, yes, but they worked. Mind you, as Tanguero said, you have to get used to other spacebar keystrokes being necessary if you actually want a proper apostrophe or quotation marks. But the foreign accents definitely work. Given that I can now toggle between the US and US International keyboards, though, I will revert for most purposes to the US one for most of my work, and toggle to the US International for titling or other foreign language work.

[agal1057]

Thanks to all of you who shared their knowledge with me, I did install the international English keyboard and it did work perfectly, I really appreciate your help