I still think that the most efficient ways of adding French accented letters or words other than with the Alt-key combos is to use cut-and-paste or do find-and-replace operations.
You can start by sticking all the accented letters in a row, all spaced out, at the top of a file. When you need an accented letter, cut it out and paste it where you need it. Keep the most frequently used symbol, é, in your cut memory buffer when not in use.
Another option is to use a special character to represent a given letter-accent combo, and when you are done, do a find-and-replace on all of them.
For example, you can use the / to represent é, \ to represent è, ^ to represent ê, etc...
Or you can do the same using initials such as JB, FX, Js or PQ to represent the long or frequent names Jean-Baptiste, François-Xavier, Joseph or Quebec, or any other.
Then at the end of your work, you simply do a find-and-replace operation under Edit to replace all of the symbols or abbreviations with the characters. This way, you type a symbol with one keystroke and let the word processor do the substitution of the Alt-code which is normally four keystrokes for you. Or you type a 2 keystroke abbreviation and turn it into a 6 to 25-or-more letter word combination.
However, you have to be careful doing it this way. If you make an error and substitute a symbol for the wrong accented letter, you can completely wreck your document. It's useful then to save the file in temp files in between each find-and-replace operation in case of a mistake. This shorcut method is not recommended if you are being distracted by pets, kids, tv, ipod or phone.
It's extremely important to keep your symbols and abbreviations consistent from work period to another, and from file to file, in case you forget a find-and-replace operation one day or want to do it some other day, like when you are completely done with the file
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16 years ago
