Accents, umlauts etc.

How do I insert an accented character into a book title or author name? In German, a, o, and u umlaut. In French e grave and e acute, etc.

Normally you'll just import the book record from a library source that already has the ä ö ë ï or whatever. If you choose "Add manually" you can input the characters directly from your keyboard or find the book / author via google and copy/paste it into the new record. You can also edit an existing record and under Advanced (to the right of the Edit window) choose "Recalculate title/author" if something is still amiss.

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You will have to change your keyboard settings. I use the Dutch (NLD) one, which allows the German and French ones. Usually through key combinations though: " followed by u produces ü, etc. For the more rare things (for me), I have a couple of instances of Czech Š for instance, I just use copy/paste.

It depends a lot on what equipment you are using. On the iPad it is easy because the 'keyboard' lets you hold a letter down to get the variations.

I use copy/paste to get the Japanese title of some of my books :-)

I don't even have the set-up to type Egyptian hieroglyphs ;)

I also copy/paste from elsewhere, usually wikipedia

Anyway, standard American English keyboard setting simply doesn't understand diacritics of any kind.

I copied from a Russian wiki-page once and got some funny accents added:
Example: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский
If you copy the name and then uses backspace to delete it again, you can see that it takes two backspaces to delete а́ and е́ because they are really an a with an appended apostroph and an e with an appended apostroph.
Just a warning in case you don't want that.

If you type accents a lot, the US International keyboard makes it easy.

>9 bnielsen: Yeah, you need to copy not from the titles (which show the accents) but from inside of the text where they are not used for Russian Wiki :)

>11 AnnieMod: Yep. Learned that the hard way :-)
Now I have a script that scrutinize the TSV export file and complains about characters not found on a list of "expected" characters.

I was hoping that there was a way to bring up a list of "special characters". If I use the list from LibreOffice, hundreds of special characters, and try to copy/paste say lower-case u-umlaut LibraryThing changes it to a-umlaut.
Alternatively, how do I change my keyboard to US International as Zoe suggested?

>13 lcl999: You need to change it in your device settings.

Or, if you're using Apple devices, you can hold down a key which will then show you different available accents to choose from (e è é ê ë ē ė ę ). Typing a character while holding down the Option key will give you another character; for instance Option + 0 gives º

>14 humouress: Cool!!! Thanks for the lesson!

>13 lcl999: If you're on Windows, you probably don't need LibreOffice to access a character map, which is what that list of special characters is called. There's a program or app called "Character Map" that should come up with a search on your device. On newer Windows operating systems, that list (or really, that character database) can be either opened with the search-and-select method or pinned to Start or your taskbar.

>15 2wonderY: You're welcome :0)