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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Does Bloomberg have a problem with umlauts?

- Aldi Sued => Aldi Süd (i.e. south)

Spelling a German umlaut with the letter e is etymologically correct, and it is a convention well known to Germans and to German-speakers in the non-German-speaking world. Most of the news reporting about the German national team to the World Cup reported the names of the players with that kind of alternative spelling, for example "Götze" as "Goetze" and "Özil" as "Oezil."

I'm aware of this. As an English speaker in Germany this is my GOTO preference for my US keyboard when writing in German. I was just puzzled as to why such a large internet property chooses not to use them, or more likely, can't.

It's the correct substitute for umlauts if the latter are not available (as opposed to "Sud").

Maybe the author didn't knew how to change the keyboard layout.

Or you can just use Compose Key. It's more practical than switching layouts all the time.

Also AFAIR on Mac OS X you can just long-press for alternative letters.

On Mac OS X I type Option-u and then the vowel for umlauts. Long press will just spam the letter you pressed.

In the majority of text boxes, it won't spam; OS X doesn't do key press repeats in most text modes. Long-pressing a vowel (or a number of other keys) brings up a popup that lets you select a variant with the number keys.

What inputs does this work in? I've tried a bunch.

Accented character menus on long-press are on by default in 10.7 and later, at least for the default U.S. English settings. Two caveats:

(1) Long-press menus appear in most places, but not everywhere. For example, they don't appear in Terminal windows.

(2) While enabled by default, long-press menus can be disabled by setting the "ApplePressAndHoldEnabled" default to false. To make sure they're not disabled globally, enter

    defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

at a shell prompt (they could still potentially be disabled at the individual application defaults level, via mandatory managed defaults, etc.).

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