If I want to include a name with a diacritical mark, such as Zoë or François, I either have to open up a character map, or an online table of ASCII codes, to find the characters to cut and paste into my mail.
It would be much easier if there was some sort of drop down box of such characters which I could just grab when I needed them. (FWIW, I mainly use Firefox under Linux.)
What is the easiest way to include such non-English characters in GMail?
Best Answer
I alternate between using Linux (mostly various flavours of Ubuntu on desktops) and MacOS; I often need to enter Swedish characters as I work there a lot. The way I handle it is to add an additional keyboard in the system settings, then I have an icon in the top menu bar of the main screen where I can select the keyboard I want to use. You can change it very easily this way.
Just watch out you don't leave it on the foreign language settings when you log out or it may make logging back in difficult if your password contains any of the remapped keys :)
Dragon NaturallySpeaking isn't free, or available natively on Linux AFAIK, which you say you are using, though I believe it can run under wine. There are speech recognition packages for linux like Julius though if you wanted to pursue this route (though it seems like overkill for this use case alone) OR you could also install Chromium version 11 and add --enable-speech-input to the end of the launcher.