Monday, February 26, 2007

More Ways to Type Spanish

If you want to type Spanish on your Mac and are used to Windows, you may run into problems figuring out which keys to use for accented characters and the inverted punctuation marks. That's because, out of the 6 commonly-used Spanish keyboard layouts provided on the two platforms, only two (Mac Spanish ISO and Windows Spanish) are the same. How this situation came about, I have no idea. You can see graphics comparing the six here.

My understanding is that many Spanish users prefer the Windows US International or Latin American layouts. For the US International layout, a version can be downloaded from this page, and for Latin American (winlatinamerican.keylayout) you can go to my iDisk.

Of course you can also type Spanish on the normal US layout: The deadkey for the acute accent is Option + e and for the tilde it is Option + n, with ¿ at Option + Shift + / and ¡ at Option + 1.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,
I tried to download the winlatinamerican.keylayout from the I Disk webpage... But I cant figure out how to download and install it. Could you help me out? Thanks,
Ivan
ivanvelasko@hotmail.com

Tom Gewecke said...

I will email you a copy. To install, put the file in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, then check its box in system prefs/international/input menu (plus the box for "show input menu in Finder,") then select in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder.

Ces said...

Hey... i think ur page is amazing!!

Could u please send me a copy of winlatinamerican.keylaout..


I'll thank u all my life!

Tom Gewecke said...

I can't email you without an address. It's easier if you just go to my iDisk and download it. The link is provided in the article.

juparave said...

Great! thank you very much, I'm very happy now with my usb keyboard fully operational.

Quiasmo Paprika said...

hello!

I'm having a diferent problem with my mac's Spanish ISO layout. I CAN'T TYPE BACKSLASH with it!!!!

I've looked all over for a key sequence to get it with this layout, but I haven't found any. My googleing has me thinking that the only solution is to install a new personalized layout .. one which I think I would have to write myself :S

Could I edit the spanish ISO layout that comes builtin with X10.4?

I would be very greatful if you could give me some leads on possible [simple] solutions.

Thanks

Tom Gewecke said...

The backslash is on the extra key (ALT + uppermost left) that exists on the ISO (European) physical keyboard, and is missing on the ANSI (US) keyboard. You can edit layouts with Ukelele:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ukelele

Dave MacDonald said...

Tom, thanks for your blog. I'm setting up a mobile iBook lab for students in Guatemala, and your blog is the only place I've found that pointed out that Spanish ISO and Windows Spanish are the same layout. Since I want to cross-train them, that's invaluable. Thanks! ~Dave

Anonymous said...

Hi I'm using a mac 10.5.6 and have switched to a Spanish keyboard and have figured out literally every symbol and character i could want EXC help EPT how to accent vowels (lower and upper case). ¿Can you help?

Tom Gewecke said...

Did you look at the graphic I provided_

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/spanishlayouts.jpg

Do you see the orange keys? You hit them and then hit the vowel. Email if you still have a problem (tom at bluesky dot org).

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanks for the help with this! I downloaded the winlatinamerica file and put it in library/keyborad, but it does not appear on the international/ input menu... i dont see it as an option to check its box. Any clues? thanks!

Tom Gewecke said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tom Gewecke said...

Make sure it ends in .keylout and nothing else, put it in home/library/keyboard layouts, and logout/login.

Unknown said...

can you send me the file? the website is offline, thanks

Tom Gewecke said...

What is your email marcelo?

Anonymous said...

Server for the Latin American layout is down (iDisk). Can you fix it? Thanks.

Tom Gewecke said...

No, but I can send you other links. Here is one https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46870715/k/winlatinamerican.keylayout