Monday, February 23, 2009

ä, å, ö, Ä, Å and Ö


As a lover of languages, it's important to me to use accurate characters when typing in Swedish. I want the words to pour out of me in their true form, meaning I incorporate ä, å, ö, Ä, Å and Ö into my writing.

You might be curious as to how someone can do that with an English language laptop with no Swedish language option keys? It's simple. Cutting and pasting individual letters is too time consuming. I use swedish.typeit.org as my text editor when writing anything with Swedish characters. Very helpful. After using it I'll copy and paste what I've written into my Gmail and check for spelling errors. The Swedish letters always come up as errors in Spell Check but it's easy to press ignore. Then you'll have a clean document with accurate Swedish letters and no spelling errors. I started using the site for homework assignments while taking my first classes in the Swedish language.

Typeit.org also works with Spanish, French, German, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Turkish.
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Vad tycker du? Kommentera gärna :)
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5 comments:

said...

One of my Facebook friends just commented on this post on FB. I thought he made a good point and wanted to share it, even though I still stand by Typeit.org as a valuable resource for those who write Swedish letters on keyboards not made in Sweden.

Friend:
"I hate to be one of "those people" but doing extended characters on a Mac is actually pretty easy. Ctrl-u then a letter gives you an umlaut for instance. Similar shortcuts (much easier to remember than Windows) are available for many others, or at least the ones you showed."

Me to friend:
"Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated. :) However, I just tested out your recommendation on my Macbook, using codes found @ http://is.gd/kBsy. While it didn't list Swedish characters, I tried the German characters that are the same as Swedish. å worked, ä didn't and ö came out as ø, which is Norwegian. http://swedish.typeit.org/ is much faster, and I feel a solution for people who write in Swedish but don't use the special characters (seen all over the web) even in news articles, which makes we wonder why English language news organizations can't write Swedish names accurately? :)"

Anonymous said...

It's easier to use Atl+ keys
Alt+0228 for ä
Alt+0229 for å
Alt+0246 for ö

said...

Hi cfagnum...your feedback is appreciated...but your suggestion does not work on my computer, a Macbook.

Anonymous said...

Varför inte bara lägga till det svenska tangentbordet?
System Preferences->International->Input menu

Längst ner kryssar du i rutan Show in menubar och vips har du en flagga uppe i menyn där du enkelt kan xäxla mellan engelska och svenska. Lätt som en plätt.

said...

Hej David...your tip is helpful for use on my Macbook, especially when typing emails with Swedish letters. But there are times when I just want a simple online text editor with Swedish characters, easy to find on any computer with any operating system (especially when you don't want to alter someone else's computer settings, or you're in a hurry and don't have time to alter settings on another computer). And for that, swedish.typeit.org is a simple and quick option. Lätt som en plätt också. :) I do appreciate your tip, which works well for email use on my computer.