German Vowels for English Keyboards...spreading some love!
Activate Num Lock on your numeric keypad.
Press and hold the Alt key.
Type the four-digit code using the numeric keypad.
Release the Alt key.
ä: Alt + 0228
Ä: Alt + 0196
ë: Alt + 0235
Ë: Alt + 0203
ï: Alt + 0239
Ï: Alt + 0207
ö: Alt + 0246
Ö: Alt + 0214
ü: Alt + 0252
Ü: Alt + 0220
Best Answer
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@jhuebner0504 - forgive me if this is a dumb question - could the same instructions be used for other languages ie French, Spanish, etc. requiring diacritical marks?
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Answers
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Danke schön!
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There's a table with loads of these 3 digit codes (not showing the leading zero) at the bottom of this page, used a lot in this household: https://www.starr.net/is/type/htmlcodes.html
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(ran out of editing time, this goes with my previous comment)
Example: table just mentioned has É for É, and ALT + numeric keypad 0201 produces the correct character.
The technique doesn't work for codes higher than 255.
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The information creating diacritics is in the German Genealogical Word List in the FamilySearch Wiki and in the group for Germany Research.
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And in case anyone has questions about diacritics and Full Text Search…. During image processing a substitution is made during the transcript generation and non-diacritic letters are used in the transcript. This would impact FTS search results except for the fact that if you for some reason enter a diacritic character in the FTS search box there once again is a substitution is made
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@Mark McKenzie_1 that's really useful to know. What effect does this then have on computer-aided/AI-based indexing of the relevant images using these transcripts? Does that use the un-diacritic-ised transcript, or does it have access to correct versions of the names, places, etc. with the diacritics in?
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@MandyShaw1 I can't speak to AI-based indexing, but if it uses FTS transcripts everything within FTS is done using the 26 letter basic latin alphabet. Any diacritics or ligatures are 'converted' when the image is processed and that is what FTS looks for when performing a query of its transcripts. You would have to take a FTS transcript and make the changes needed to reflect the diacritics in the original document. Hope that makes sense….
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Perfect, if slightly disappointing, sense.
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Hey, none of it matters if AWS "Amazon Web Services" and other parts of the "net" are having major DNS "domain naming service" issues. It's the core of the internet. What turns a name into the real number a server or set of servers uses. Like Today, Monday, 10/20/2025.
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Not everyone has a numeric keypad anymore. Saving on desktop space. I have 3 keyboards on my 4' table already. Need a couple more.
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