Holding the spacebar pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism ( a so-called " dead key " feature ), allowing one to superimpose multiple keystrikes on a single location.
42.
On many computer keyboards, the grave accent is a key by itself meant to combine with vowels as a multi-key combination or as a dead key to modify the following letter.
43.
Dead keys, which had a notch cut out to avoid hitting a mechanical linkage that triggered carriage movement, were used for characters that were intended to be combined ( overstruck ).
44.
Usually, the diacritic in an isolated form can be generated with the dead key followed by " space ", so a plain grave accent can be typed by pressing and then.
45.
Let's take another example : is most easily entered by, whereas a single dead key solution turns out to be something like ( as would be used for S ! ).
46.
The US keyboard layout has a second Alt key instead of the AltGr key and does not use any dead keys; this makes it inefficient for all but a handful of languages.
47.
This use of dead keys enables one to type a wide variety of precomposed characters that combine various diacritics with either uppercase or lowercase letters, achieving a similar effect to the Compose key.
48.
It is typically a dead key, which does not cause the carriage to advance and thus allows the following letter to strike the same spot ( below the circumflex ) on the paper.
49.
In the absence of a default dead key, even a normal printing key can temporarily be altered to function as a dead key by simultaneously holding down another modifier key ( typically Option ).
50.
In the absence of a default dead key, even a normal printing key can temporarily be altered to function as a dead key by simultaneously holding down another modifier key ( typically Option ).
