Having Trouble Typing International Characters

Question

Hi I have a quick question about making international characters on my mini, I just don't know how to set it up and I may have screwed something up too. First off I found this web link that has what I think to be a good break down of character commands. commandshttp://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/Language_Center/accentsmac.htm
But much to my disappointment not all of them work correctly I'm trying to use Spanish letters, so then I thought i'll go into the international option in the system preferences and activate spanish as one of my languages and that is where I think I went wrong. Truthfully I don't truly understand what this option is all or how to use it correctly. If you can help I would really appreciate it thanks.

Answer 1

Other countries, even English speaking ones, will often have a different keyboard layout. For example, in England they need a pound currency keyboard symbol on the keyboard and replace one of the ones used in the US (I'm not sure which one) with a pound symbol. In other countries the differences are greater and where you type the letter Z on a keyboard may instead produce a letter Y. International lets you select these other keyboards which could potentially remap your whole keyboard including providing easier access to accented characters commonly used in other languages, but at the cost of losing some of your usual keyboard characters or having to learn new positions for those.
The other way to use characters is to keep your normal keyboard but use special key combinations as you found in that other website. For example, to produce a o-umlaut (o with two dots over it, ö) you type option+u and then the letter o. Obviously if you are writing a whole book in German this can be tiresome, but if you are just doing it for the purposes of posting in Apple Discussions as I just did it is easier than having to learn the German keyboard.