Scratch

This is one of the more annoying "small problems" of Scratch (and Alice, which has the same Java character set problem) - even for someone who is basically as "English-only" in conversation and writing as I am.  For someone who's first language isn't English, it must be a real annoyance.

I have been trying to find the temporary fix described in the next sections, but so far haven't been successful.   Maybe some other forum contributor can help.

Many years ago, IBM came up with special print balls for their Selectric typewriters (I said it was many years ago  ) that had normal font styles but the accented characters and European punctionation marks. This same font (set of fonts?) survived for daisy wheels and early dot matrix printers and was essentially designed as 7-bit ASCII with substitutions for the "foreign" characters.

Not the best of solutions - you sometimes you had to stop, switch balls and retype special characters - but it worked and the results looked good.  Also, the keyboard mapping was set up so that you could type most accented text without having to change balls.  It's this last - quite clever - mapping I can't remember and can't seem to find.

As near as I can tell, the Java problem, at least, is that character codes above ASCII 127 are simply not supported.  If someone can fine/make a True Type font that duplicates the ancient IBM ball character set, there would at least be an interim partial solution to this problem.