
ADD A TILDE IN WORD CODE
Overprinting was intended to work by putting a backspace code between the codes for letter and diacritic. Instead a single key was changed to a tilde dead key and ⟨~⟩ was born as a distinct grapheme.ĪSCII incorporated many of the overprinting lower-case diacritics from typewriters, including tilde. Whereas it was just about possible to find one low-use key to sacrifice for Spanish, to find two sacrificial keys for Portuguese was impractical. Portuguese, however, has two: ã Ã and õ Õ. Both were precomposed as distinct graphemes and assigned to a single typebar, which sacrificed a key that was felt to be less important, usually the 1⁄ 4 1⁄ 2 key.

In modern Spanish, the tilde accent is needed only for the characters ñ and Ñ. Spanish and Portuguese uniquely use the tilde diacritic.
ADD A TILDE IN WORD MANUAL
On others, however, the typebar had two different diacritics so that users could only add accents to lower-case letters without manual intervention or other adjustment.įor most Western European languages, the only diacritics used are acute ( ´), grave ( `, circumflex ( ˆ) and diaeresis (or umlaut, ¨): early typewriters for the European market included these as dead keys. To add a diacritic to a capital letter on some typewriters, the upper-case version of the accent could be produced using ⇧ Shift plus the diacritic key. Since the diacritic key – a 'dead key' – had not moved the paper on, the letter was printed under the previously-printed accent. To achieve an accented letter, the typist first typed the desired diacritic, then typed the letter to be accented. On typewriters designed for languages that routinely use diacritics (accent marks), a dead key mechanism was provided: a mark is made when a dead key is typed but, unlike normal keys, the paper carriage does not move on. This symbol did not exist independently as a type or hot-lead printing character. The incorporation of the tilde into ASCII is a direct result of its appearance as a distinct character on Portuguese mechanical typewriters in the late nineteenth century.
