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Computing With Accents and Foreign Scripts
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Italian

Almost all applications support Italian accents. Guidelines for typing and using accents are given below.  If you need to refer to additional characters, look under the Accents tab.

  1. Accent Codes
    1. Windows Alt Codes
    2. Windows International Keyboard
    3. Macintosh Accent Codes
  2. Italian or International Keyboards (New Page)
  3. HTML Accent Codes
    1. Language Codes: it
    2. Selected Dialect/Languages: co (Corsican), sc (Sardinian)
  4. Linux Links

Windows Alt Codes

In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a non-English character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.  Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.

Alt Codes for typing Italian characters:
  Capital Vowels
À ALT+0192
È ALT+0200
É ALT+0201
Ì ALT+0204
Ò ALT+0210
Ó ALT+0211
Ù ALT+0217

 

  Lowercase Vowels
à ALT+0224
è ALT+0232
é ALT+0233
ì ALT+0236
ò ALT+0242
ó ALT+0243
ù ALT+0249
  Consonants/Punctuation
« ALT+0171 (Left Angle Quote)
» ALT+0187 (Right Angle Quote)
ALT+0128

 

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Windows International Keyboard Codes

In order to use these codes you must activate the international keyboard. Instructions are listed in the Keyboards section of this Web site.

Character Description
Grave (Backwards) Accent

(`+V) - Type grave key (upper right), then the vowel.

Acute (Forwards) Accent

('+V) - Type apostrophe (singe quote), then the vowel.

«, »

RightAlt+[    
Right Alt+]      (You must use the Alt key on the Right)

Control+Right Alt+5

Windows Italian Keyboard

If you wish to simulate a non U.S. keyboard, follow the instructions for Activating Keyboard Locales to activate and switch Microsoft keyboards.

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Macintosh Accent Codes

Character Description
Grave (Backwards) Accent

Type Option+`, then then the vowel. For instance, to type à hold down Option+` then type lowercase A. To type À, hold down Option+`, then type capital A.

Acute (Forwards) Accent

Type Option+E, then the vowel.

«, »

Option+\
Shift+Option+\

Shift+Control+2 (may not work for older System 9 fonts)

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HTML Accent Codes

Italian Encoding and Languge Tags

These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.

See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.

HTML Entity Codes

Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type caffè you would type caffè.

The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because è is number 232, caffè can also be used to input caffè. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.

laquo and raquo are left and right double angle quotes
Alt Codes for typing Italian characters:
Note: Single angle quotes (‹/›) not supported on Netscape 4.7.
  Capital Vowels
À À (192)
È È (200)
É É (201)
Ì Ì (204)
Ò Ò (210)
Ó Ó (211)
Ù Ù (217)

 

  Lowercase Vowels
à à (224)
è è (232)
é é(233)
ì ì(236)
ò ò (242)
ó ó (243)
ù ù (249)
  Punctuation
« « (171)
» » (187)
‹
›
€

Note: Older browsers may not the suport single angle codes (‹ / › for ‹ and ›).

Using Encoding and Language Codes

Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.

To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.

Generic Encoding Template

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>

Declare Unicode

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>

XHTML

The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML

Declare Unicode in XHTML

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>

No Encoding Declared

If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.

Language Tags

Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.

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Links

Linux/Unix

Most Linux or Unix information is in Italian.

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©Penn State University, 2000-2007.
This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.
Last Modified: Friday, 27-Jun-2008 14:46:37 EDT