Diacritics are special markings that appear on certain French-language letters. Examples of these letters are é, as in the word études, and ô, as in the word rôle.
It is important that diacritics are included when entering search keywords because diacritics are preserved in any record that contains French-language text. Therefore, searching for the keyword mathematiques will not retrieve records that contain the keyword mathématiques.
There are 2 solutions available to ensure that records indexed with words that contain diacritics will be retrieved :
- Whenever a letter with a diacritical symbol must be entered, use the ALT key equivalent for that letter. For example, to enter the letter é, hold down the ALT key while entering the digits 0233. You can view a table for some common ALT key equivalents.
- If your keyboard does not properly map to the ALT key equivalents, and/or you do not know how to determine them, replace the diacritical letter with the percentage sign, i.e. %. For example, you could conduct a search by using the keyword math%matiques to retrieve records that contain the word mathématiques. However, caution should be exercised when using this method because records will be retrieved that have any text string in place of the percentage sign. For example, if the keyword r%le were entered, records that contained the word rôle would be retrieved, along with records that contained the word principle or the phrase Real Estate for Legal Secretaries.
Diacritics ALT + Key Equivalent Table
| Letter | ALT Key Equivalent |
|---|---|
| à | ALT + 0224 |
| â | ALT + 0226 |
| ç | ALT + 0231 |
| è | ALT + 0232 |
| é | ALT + 0233 |
| ê | ALT + 0234 |
| ô | ALT + 0244 |
| ö | ALT + 0246 |
| û | ALT + 0251 |
| É | ALT + 0201 |
