Accent Composer

Accent Composer lets you create any character supported by Windows on any keyboard. 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 accented letter 'ñ' just press the Compose key followed by '~' and 'n'.

"Many thanks for sending the copy of Accent Composer so promptly. It is an excellent utility which will save me a considerable amount of time." - R.H., U.K.

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.

Unicode

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.

Text Snippets

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.

How It Works

"I work in French occasionally on an English UK keyboard and it is difficult to overstate how useful not to say invaluable Accent Composer is to me." - J.C., Scotland

Accent Composer places a small icon (a red Á) on the Taskbar notification area (also called the tray or system area), next to the clock and other utility icons. When you press the Compose key this icon changes colour to let you know Accent Composer is now trapping a compose sequence.

You can customize Accent Composer in many ways. The hotkey can be picked from 28 possible choices, such as the right control key or Alt-F10. The compose sequences can also be changed to whatever is most memorable for you.