Family Historian V6.0 introduced the Configure Language & Accent Characters feature along with Unicode support, and ƒh V6.2.3 added some new options for invoking the accent popup window.
For full details use Tools > Preferences and navigate to the General tab to seethe To Enter Accents When Typing setting and its associated Help. The feature supports diacritics on Western letters (A-Za-z), Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, most Asian languages, and innumerable symbols.
For earlier ƒh versions, or when the accent popup is disabled, use the following entry methods.
Entry Methods
Character Map
The Character Map utility is free on all Windows machines and can be used to copy and paste accented letters and other foreign language characters into any Windows application. The Character Map is similar to the Insert Symbol tool found in some Windows applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft FrontPage.
To open the Character Map utility click on the Windows Start menu, and depending on your Windows version select Windows Accessories » Character Map or select Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Character Map. (Or use Start » Run, and type Charmap).
After choosing a font, double click the desired character(s), click on Copy, return to your document and use Paste.
Note: On some PCs, the Character Map may be in another location under Accessories or the Start menu.
Alt Key
You can enter a range of special characters using the ALT key and the number pad (it will not work with the number keys above the QWERTY keyboard). For example, to type a euro symbol € hold down the Alt key and type 0128 on the number pad of your keyboard. A few characters can be entered using the AltGr key as tabulated below, e.g. AltGr a produces á.
You can find a full list of ALT codes at alt-codes.net
Double-Barrelled Names
To form double-barrelled names into one indivisible name, the two names can be separated by a no-break-space character code 0160, which in ƒh V6.0 can be added to the repeated space popup as follows. Click its cog, select the Hold Key (space) and click Edit, then insert Alt+0160 between any existing characters in the Accent Popup List and OK out.
Accented Characters etc. under Wine on Linux
WINE creates an apparent Windows environment in which ƒh can run on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. This note refers to the Linux implementation.
The Linux Wine Implementation does not include the Windows Character Map Utility. However, Linux has its own Character Map Utilities (usually found under accessories in the menu) and you can copy and paste from such a utility into ƒh. Some Character Map utilities offer a lot of characters – using the Gnome utility the most used ones are under “Common” or “Latin”.
The Windows Alt + ANSI Key code short-cut does not work – because you are not actually in Windows! Likewise, the Linux Ctrl-Shift + u+Unicode does not work because ƒh is not a Linux program! However, you can assemble complex strings within Linux and then cut and paste the entire string into ƒh. Provided Windows recognises the range of complex characters it will represent them – in the case of most Western Characters this should not be an issue.
The V6.2.3 accent popup window (an ƒh functionA 'function' is an expression which returns values based on computations. Typically, functions require data to be supplied to them as 'parameters'. A function in Family Historian is similar to a 'function' as used in spreadsheet applications (such as MS) however does work as expected (just hold a key down to get the accented options for that letter) and in most cases this is the easiest way to enter most accented characters.
(This note is based on using Wine 4.0.2 running on Lubuntu 18.04 and is expected to apply to all Debian based Linux implementations – Ubuntu and Variants, Mint and Variants, etc. The actual Character Map used is the Gnome implementation. It is quite likely to apply to Wine under other Linux distributions and to Mac etc.)