Editorial Review of Accent Composer
Do you work with foreign languages or mathematical copy? Do you
enjoy searching through Microsoft Word's Equation and Symbol
dialogs to insert the special characters that you need? Then stop
reading, because Accent Composer will be of no use to you.
Accent Composer provides simple hotkey combinations that let you
insert practically any special character into just about any
Windows interface. It includes a default list containing hundreds
of Unicode symbols, and you can add more as necessary. You can even
assign hotkey combinations to short text blocks, such as addresses
or professional titles. The default "Compose" key is the right-hand
Alt key (but you can select another key if you wish). If you need
to type the pi character, for example, you'd press Alt-g-p.
When you launch Accent Composer, you're presented with a
well-written and well-organized Help screen that explains how to
use the program and customize its options. There's also a helpful
PDF that shows you the default keystrokes necessary to call up all
of the default sequences. If you can't find the special character
or symbol you need in this chart, you can easily add your own. The
sequences themselves are easy to memorize, and there is practically
no lag when you type them in. I can see this program being
extremely useful for anyone who frequently works with mathematical
or scientific copy, or who needs to type in foreign languages on a
standard English keyboard.
--Kim Saccio-Kent
Description of Accent Composer
Accent Composer simplifies the process of typing accented characters and other symbols into Windows programs. It lets you enter any character, in any program, with an easy-to-remember sequence of keystrokes.
To create an accented character simply press the designated 'Compose' key (the right-hand Alt key by default), then press the desired accent mark followed by the letter. For example, to produce the letter n-tilde ( ) just press the Compose key followed by '~' and 'n'.
Accent Composer is not limited to accented characters. For instance, the copyright symbol, , can be produced with the keystrokes 'Compose', 'c' and 'o', while the Yen symbol can be created with 'Compose', '=' and 'Y'.
Accent Composer is initially set up to produce more than 350 symbols and characters, including all accented Latin characters and all Greek characters. You can see a summary of them here (PDF). These will allow you to easily type accented characters in languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Portuguese and many other languages.
You can also add any of the more than 65,000 characters defined in the Unicode standard. These include alphabets such as Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic, as well as ideographs and symbols from various Asian languages. You need to have a Unicode-enabled font in use to access these, but Windows standard fonts like Arial and Times New Roman contain thousands of characters. Microsoft Office users will have the Arial Unicode MS font with over 50,000 characters. Other fonts can be found through WikiPedia's Unicode Typefaces page.
Another major feature that will save you time and typing effort is text snippets. No longer limited to just a single character, Accent Composer can now produce a string of text of any length with just a two character compose sequence. For example, you can define Compose-a-d to produce your entire address.
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