Compose Key (F6)

 

The F6 key (the "compose key") provides a quick and powerful way of entering a wide variety of specialized characters. Its most basic use is to add accents or other diacritical marks to letters in the Roman, Hebrew, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Multiple accents can be added to virtually any letter in virtually any combination.

Basic instruction for using the compose key are as follows:

 

1Type any letter, number or other character
2Press F6
3The F6 pop-up screen will appear showing all of the accents that can be placed on the letter you just typed. Find the accented letter that you want and enter it using one of the following methods.
Type the letter shown in the small yellow square in the square that contains the character you want to enter.  
Double-click the square that contains the character you want to enter.
Click the square that contains the character you want to enter and then press Enter.

If you remember the letter in the small yellow square, you do not need to wait for the F6 pop-up screen to appear. For example, you can type an e with an acute accent by typing e, F6, a.  The letters corresponding to the accents have been assigned so that they will be easy to remember (a for acute, g for grave, u for umlaut, etc.).

 

If you have Lingua, additional options will be available, and the F6 key can be used with different alphabets. If Shift, Alt, Ctrl, Ctrl+Shift or Ctrl+Alt are shown at the top of the screen highlighted in green, then additional options can be viewed and entered by pressing the corresponding keys (Shift, Alt, etc.) on your keyboard.

 

Additional accents can be placed on the same letter by repeating steps 2 and 3. If both accents appear above the letter, they will be stacked in the order in which they were placed.

 

In addition to adding accents, the compose key can be used to transform numbers or other characters into less commonly used characters. See the following pages for more details about how the F6 key can be used with different characters and different alphabets.

 

Compose Key: Letters (Roman or Cyrillic alphabet)
Compose Key: Numbers
Compose Key: Other Characters
Compose Key: Greek
Compose Key: Hebrew
Compose Key: Arabic

         

 

See also:

Accents, bullets, special characters

Lingua character inventory

Lingua: editing accents

Font-rendering options

Lingua smart characters