Working at a company that produces software to assist in machine translation of documents, staffed by people from all over the world, it's sometimes handy to be able to type non-english characters. Windows doesn't exactly make that easy. If you have a keyboard for the language in question it is fine, because you can use various mode switch and shift keys to build up the keystrokes required to get the necessary characters.

Unfortunately, I don't have all those shift keys and switch modes and such. I'm English, and get lumbered with the most basic keyboard in the world. I have no extra keys. Now, on a Mac or Unix machine it's OK. The Mac uses option+key to create umlauts, graves and so on, and anything running X11 can use a compose key to make just about any character known to man. Windows is rather more ... arcane. You can press altGr+key and see what you get, but that seems to be pretty much random and changes system to system, or you can hold alt and type out the unicode number for the character you want.

This means that while on my Linux machine, I can type altGr, ', e to get é, and on my mac I can press option+', e to get the same, on Windows I have to type alt+0233. As you can see, this isn't the most effective mnemonic when you have characters such as ø to contend with (alt+0248, if you're interested) it can get wearing. Interestingly, if you miss the 0 and press alt+248, you get °.

So what's the solution to all this? Well, short of "use a different computer that doesn't suck so bad", the answer is to install AllChars. This is a free-as-in-speech program that gives you compose key functionality on Windows. The choice of compose keys are limited (ctrl, shift or escape) but it really does work.

The characters I mentioned above are all within easy reach with AllChars. For instance:

1. ctrl, /, o = ø
2. ctrl, ', e = é
3. ctrl, d, g = ° (dg being short for 'degree')

As a bonus, it also allows you to create keyboard macros that you can assign to a combination of keys so that you can launch them whenever you want. Very handy.

One word of warning, though. If you have the Windows Language Bar shown in the taskbar or floating about on the desktop, be sure to turn it off. It can interfere with AllChars, and hopefully you should be able to do without it once you have AllChars up and running.

Update: It seems that I was mistaken. There is a new, undocumented option called '*nix-feelalike' that enables a bunch of other key combos to be used as compose keys. I now have it enabled and altGr selected. The different is that instead of pressing three keys independently, I press altGr+accent, letter. E.g. altGr+' then e makes é.