>>I think thisone would me cost some time too. I consider it over the edge.
>>Ah, FYI Neukölln, if you miss ö simple typ oe. (As we have done on the times of CP/M) This rule works for ä and ü as well.
>
>I wonder why now - I remember that even in the eighties anything with a keyboard had to have the umlaut characters and the scharfes ess. My Atari STf, bought in München in 1988, has them. And all four special characters you have are a part of the Western character set which is installed on 99% of machines in the world. The ae for ä, oe for ö etc was a stopgap measure in the late sixties and seventies, when there were many computers incapable of holding 8 bit character sets, so it was understandable then. Why now, when that battle was won once already?

If ones keybord is without the character, its much eaiser to remeber the ä-ae thing then some stupid codes. The ä is infact ae.
The ß char is more tricky because it is a ligature from ss o sz. (One need to have german characters like Fraktur to see it) The spoken language loose the distinction, so wo kreep to get rid of it.

Ah and the CP/M times, the keyboards available to me were all without umlaut and ß. Munich was a little bit outside my scope.

Agnes