The Norwegian alphabet has three letters not found in the English
alphabet: æ, ø, and å. If you bought your Mac
in Norway, it probably has these letters on the keyboard. But in
any case, all Macs
have the ability to type these characters, even if they are not
marked on the keyboard. There are several different ways to do it.
æ : <option> ' [apostrophe, or single quote]
These are all simple ones : press and hold the option key,
then press the letter, then release all the keys.
Æ : <shift><option> '
As above, press and hold both the shift and the option keys,
then press the letter, then release all the keys.
Note that if you are using some other keyboard layout than
English, expect the key combinations to be different. Use Key Caps
to find out what they are for your system.
It is easy to switch between keyboard layouts, so you won't
have to go to the trouble of typing with the Norwegian keyboard
full time. When multiple keyboard layouts are selected, for
example US and Norwegian, a new menu appears on the right-hand
side of the menu bar which shows a flag icon of the current
keyboard. Use this menu to switch keyboards, or use the <command><spacebar>
key combination to switch. Be aware that sometimes you
may accidently switch keyboard layouts without realizing it, and then
you will wonder why keyboard commands such as cut and paste don't
work anymore.
With MacOS X, this is done by going into the Systems Preferences,
then into the International panel, and then selecting the Keyboard Menu tab.
Once there, it is the same as above.
Note: the info given here should be valid for Mac OS versions
8 and 9 and X. Older versions of MacOS also have this capability,
but Apple did not make it easy for users to turn it on.
Some programs, especially e-mail clients, may allow you to set the character set used.
For e-mail messages this should be ISO-Latin-1, also known as
ISO-8859-1. The standard to use for anything beyond this
character should be Unicode (or UTF-8), although many other
encodings are still in use.
If the technology can't do it the way humans like it,
then humans can admit defeat and do it the way the machines like it.
The following two-letter representations can be used instead
of the special characters, leaving it up to the humans at
the other end to know what you mean:
æ : ae
BACK
to the Norskklassen home page.
Key Caps
Key Caps is a program which shows you a picture of your keyboard
and what letter each key types. Press the various modifier keys
(shift, option, etc, or combinations of these keys)
and watch the labels of the keys change accordingly.
This is very handy to find out the proper key combination needed
to type special characters,
and it is also useful to actually type the characters. Just
type them in Key Caps and then cut and paste them into your document.
This program is normally found in the Apple menu for MacOS.
For MacOS X, it is in the Utilities folder of the Applications
folder.
Use the "option" key
Once know what the special key-combinations are, you can just type them.
If you are using the English keyboard layout, then these
key combinations are as follows for Norwegian:
ø : <option> o
å : <option> a
You can press the shift key with any of the above combinations for capitals:
Ø : <shift><option> o
Å : <shift><option> a
Keyboard Layouts
Changing the layout of keys on your keyboard is easy to do.
The Keyboard program (found in the Control Panel submenu of
the Apple menu) allows you to select the standard keyboard
layout for several countries including Norway. This has
the advantage that the special characters are much easier to
type, but it has the disadvantage that some other characters
are moved to new locations on the keyboard. Consult Key Caps.
Character Set Encodings
The Mac has had international features for a long time. This
turns out to be unfortunate. When the Mac came out there was
a standard for the first 128 characters of the character set (ASCII),
but the second 128 characters varied between platforms. The
Mac added the common special characters for European languages,
but in the end a different encoding was chosen to be the standard
(ISO-Latin-1). Windows used the new standard encoding, but Mac
continued with its own (MacRoman). The Norwegian special
characters are in both sets, but they are in different positions in
the character sets. The result of this is that any special character typed on
a Mac might appear as a different special character on a Windows
PC, and vice-versa. Mac users should be aware of this. It causes
problems for unsuspecting users. Some
programs will deal with these differences automatically. This is
what happens with Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and HTML files if they
are done right. Most programs do not do any translation.
If all else fails
ø : oe
å : aa