How Accent Composer works

Accent Composer can be set up to produce characters other than the default ones (e.g. it can produce characters from Eastern European, Greek, etc. languages), but only if:

1. you have a font installed that actually contains these characters and
2. your word processor is set to use that font.

You will then need to create some new compose sequences to match those new characters. The help file with Accent Composer tells you how to do this.

As further explanation, the characters produced by Accent Composer rely on the particular font in use in your word processor or other program. When you press a compose sequence, Accent Composer tells the word processor "put in the character that is at position 0169 in the table of characters for this font". To produce the expected character the active font must contain that character at position 0169 in the table. If another font is in use with a different character at that position then this different one will be displayed instead.

You can view all the available characters in a font through the Windows Character Map utility (which can be found on the Start Menu under Programs|Accessories) or through the dialog box produced when you press the Add button on the Accent Composer Options dialog.

If you are looking for fonts to produce particular characters, try some of the following links:

Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive - An extensive collection of fonts for languages from around the world.

Yamada Language Center font archive - Another collection of fonts for languages from around the world.

Yahoo fonts - Yahoo's list of font sites.

The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup - A site explaining how Windows (and other operating systems) deal with character sets and fonts for different languages.