in os 9 and previous, you could easily make the funky characters the english language doesn't utilized (accents, umlauts, etc.). you just had to press the option key and then some other keys and bam, there's the fucking character you need. NOT SO IN OS X!!!! you have to open the key caps program. that's soooo like fucking window's character map, it's not even funny...ok, so it still looks like the mac key caps program and not the windows character map. but it IS like the character map in that there is a default text font and you can change fonts when searching for a character. what i don't like about that is whenever i'm searching for a letter in key caps, i copy and paste it to the main program i am using only to find out that what i pasted is the wrong font/size. it sucks. it's a waste of time. i miss os 9 for this reason.

[update 11/5/03: for some reason today i tried typing characters such as é using the old mac keyboard shortcut and it worked. all the shortcuts i could think of worked! i don't know why it didn't work before. i thought that perhaps it was a software issue so i tried the same command in several different programs. nope, that wasn't the problem. the command worked fine in each program i tried. but, on a side note, i have noticed that i am having microsoft word issues. one file in particular is where i am noticing the glitches. i have been changing the dates in the file, saving it, printing it. then the next time i open it, i don't read it over, i just hit print. when i look at the print out, it's a previous version with incorrect dates. this really pisses me off because it's a strange déjà vu.]