Norwegian has three vowels not found in English: æ, ø, and
å. There are several ways to generate these characters on a PC,
and in addition there is a standard way to represent them with ordinary
ASCII characters.
The most direct way to get Norwegian characters (on a PC running Windows)
is to load the Norwegian keyboard driver. This lets you switch between
your regular keyboard mapping and a Norwegian variant which has the
three additional characters in place of some punctuations. In Windows 95,
for example, you can do this by choosing the following:
Start
Then you select Norwegian (Bokmal) [sic] from the list and click the
appropriate options to hot-key between the two keyboard mappings. You
must have the Windows installations disks or CD, or have the right .CAB
files on your hard disk.
Windows allows you to compose characters not found on the keyboard by
holding down the Alt key while keying a sequence on the numeric keypad
to the right of the keyboard. For some of the Norwegian characters
there exist both 3-digit and 4-digit sequences that seem to work, for
some only the 4-digit sequences seem to work.
Most Windows installations have a Character Map under Accessories,
which lets you select special characters and paste them into your
application (mail or whatever). In some versions you can also map
those special characters to keystroke combinations. Most people
find the Character Map too awkward for Norwegian, where you
can count on at least one or two special characters per sentence.
If none of the above methods work, or if you are on a different type
of computer, the following equivalents are recognized:
æ : ae
BACK
to the Norskklassen home page.
Method 1 - install keyboard driver.
Settings
Control Panel
Keyboard
Language
AddMethod 2 - use Alt key.
Char 3-digit 4-digit æ 145 0230 Æ 146 0198 ø --- 0248 Ø --- 0216 å 134 0229 Å 143 0197 Method 3 - Character Map
Method 4 - two-letter representations
ø : oe
å : aa