Inserting international characters a la MS Office

[rmcmanus54]

I've become very accustomed to the key sequences used in MS Office to allow entry of international (non-US keyboard) characters. Pressing Ctrl+' followed by the a, for example, generates an á and pressing Ctrl+Shift+~ and then the n generates a ñ. I'd like to setup scripts to mimic this in UE, but if I understand correctly, neither hotkeys nor chords can handle consecutive key sequences. Has anyone attempted to do this or something similar? In most cases, turning these key sequences into chords isn't an alternative, for example keying Ctrl+Shift+~+n, which is more stretching than my fingers can handle.

Thanks,
Rip McManus
Glendale, WI

[Mofi]

I do not understand why this should not be possible with chords. A chord is a combination of 2 key presses within a short time. The time can be configured in the key mapping configuration dialog.

I tested pressing Ctrl+' followed by pressing key A and it worked fine. Also pressing Ctrl+Shift+~ followed by pressing key N worked. Of course the standard multi-key delay is just 500 ms and therefore the keys must be pressed fast. To be honest, I have not defined Ctrl+' and Ctrl+Shift+~ because I'm using German keyboard which requires pressing Shift+# to get character ' and therefore the first key sequence for this chord was Ctrl+Shift+#. I must press on German keyboard AltGr++ to get character ~ inserted and therefore the first key sequence for Ctrl+Shift+~ was on my computer Alt+Ctrl+Shift++. On a German keyboard I can insert character á just by pressing key ´ followed by key a.

And I made this test not with scripts. Scripts are not good in this case because too slow for simply inserting a single character. Much better is to do these character inserts by macro and collect all those macros for inserting special characters into a macro file which is set to be automatically loaded on startup of UltraEdit. All macros should have not enabled the 2 macro properties. With macros you could also make the insert of the special characters very easily file extension depended, see for example my post German umlaut problems after converting utf-8 -> ascii.

[rmcmanus54]

Thanks Mofi. I had to slow the multi-key delay to 750 ms to catch some of the harder ones reliably, but it worked like a charm. Guess I should have tried a little harder before posting the question, but your answer definitely saved me a lot of time.