Since I will need to write some French accents every now and again in the future but I ususally work on a UK or US keyboard layout I collected these Unicode codes. According to Wikipedia this should be enough to type any character you encounter in French. I wrote everything on a piece of paper, then immediately spilled a cup of coffee over it. So I thought a blog post was in order, both for my own reference and for others who might need it.
These codes work in any GTK application, which luckily includes Firefox, Thunderbird and Pidgin, i.e. just about the only three applications where I might care to use accents and all that stuff. :) The only other application I really need is a terminal, and I use the Gnome terminal emulator for that, which also uses GTK. So between these applications I think 99% of my computer time is covered and I won't bother to find out how to properly type these accents in any other way :)
How to use the Codes
In GTK you enter Unicode characters by pressing Ctrl+Shift+U, then typing the character code, then pressing Space or Enter.
Alternatively you can hold the Ctrl+Shift+U combination while typing the code and then just release it.
Combining Codes
Unicode allows the composition of characters.
So for the most cases you can actually get away with a few codes that only represent the "decorations".
To use these, you first type whichever character you want to decorate (say a 'U') and then enter the code (say 327) afterwards (i.e. with the cursor placed after the 'U') and voilà, you get 'U̧'.
Helpful, I know :)
So here are the combining characters for accents and the diaeresis, aka umlaut:
| Code | Combining Symbol |
|---|---|
| 300 | Grave Accent |
| 301 | Acute Accent |
| 302 | Circumflex Accent |
| 308 | Diaeresis |
| 327 | Cedilla |
Ligatures: Æ and Œ
These are not combinations of symbols, so you need to know their codes.
| Code | Symbol |
|---|---|
| e6 | æ |
| c6 | Æ |
| 153 | œ |
| 152 | Π|
Shorter Codes
Some symbols (think 'ç', 'é', 'è', 'à') are more common than others, so you might want to remember these (shorter) codes separately. The Unicode tables for characters are loooooong so I collected the symbols used in French into this shorter table:
| A | a | E | e | I | i | O | o | U | u | Y | y | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acute | c9 | e9 | ||||||||||
| Grave | c1 | e1 | c8 | e8 | d9 | f9 | ||||||
| Circumflex | c2 | e2 | ca | ea | ce | ee | d4 | f4 | db | fb | ||
| Diaeresis | cb | eb | cf | ef | dc | fc | 178 | ff |
Or if you just came here to copy/paste a symbol, here you go:
| Codes | Symbols |
|---|---|
| c9 | e9 |
| e7 | c7 |
| c1 | e1 |
| c8 | e8 |
| d9 | f9 |
| c2 | e2 |
| ca | ea |
| ce | ee |
| d4 | f4 |
| db | fb |
| cb | eb |
| cf | ef |
| dc | fc |
| 178 | ff |
M̀ȩ l̈ík̀êş! ʘ‿ʘ