shoestring gringa

For all you bloggers and readers out there in Spanish-language land, I thought I’d pass on my latest discovery of how to insert special characters like accented letters into a Wordpress (or any HTML) document.  I’m sure there are many ways to do this, and possibly better ways, but this one is so simple that I’ve managed to use it several times in a row without having to reread the instructions.  I found it on this blog, thanks Tech Paul!  Basically you put the Character Map (which I never knew was even IN my computer; it’s in Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character Map) onto your Quick Launch bar.  Then when you need an accented letter, simply click the Character Map icon and it will pop up in a small screen.  Select the font if needed (default is Arial), click on the character, click Select and then Copy.  Go back to your document and do Ctrl V or Paste to insert the character.  The Character Map will remain minimized on the Task Bar.

I must say the Character Map is an annoying little tool, with no rhyme or reason to its arrangement that I can see, so in the interest of public service I am going to share the location of the characters needed for Spanish here.  These, by the way, are all in the first ten rows, so you don’t have to scroll.

¡ — 5th row down

¿ — 7th row down

á — 8th row down

é, í, ó, and ñ — 9th row down

ú — 10th row down

Note that the ñ is not among the other n’s as logic would suggest, but sandwiched in among the vowels.

In the course of setting this up, I made a number of fascinating discoveries about the Quick Launch bar, which I do not have the strength to describe.

When typing words in Spanish, it’s usually no big deal to just leave the accents off, but once in a while you really need them, as when I wanted to wish everybody a happy new year here:

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! = Happy New Year!

¡Feliz Ano Nuevo! = Happy New Butthole!

My original idea of how to set up this blog was to use the posts for ongoing musings, doings, etc., and have all the “useful information about living in Mexico” off to the side in a collection of “Articles.” As it turns out, a programmer, or maybe even someone just slightly geekier than myself (a group which would include most of the world population), could do this with their eyes closed, but after two weeks of wandering in cyber-hell I am ready to give up on that original vision and surrender to the reality of my technical limitations. The Wordpress software would seem to prefer I do it otherwise: So be it. Everything will start its life as a “post,” so that a daily entry might contain either a passing thought or a detailed piece on a specific topic. Hopefully, once off the front page, the material will (magically! automatically! without me having to learn html, css, and php!!) drift off to reside in comprehensible, searchable, easy-to-use categories.

And we’ll all live happily ever after.