How to type/insert special characters in chrome

Yesterday, I briefly touched upon typing special characters in my previous post (in the lessons learnt bit in the aside regarding typing "vis-á-vis" with the "a" with the accent grave). By special characters here, I'm referring largely to foreign language characters like in: French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek etc. In the previous blogpost I just used the Windows ALT+ codes, with a link on how to do it. But that quiet frankly takes too much time, especially if:

• You ocassionally type in foreign lanaguages
• Just use a lot of French or Latin derived terms when typing in English
• You type a lot in web browsers (you'll see why later, part of the solution)   

I thought to myself, there must be a better way of doing this than actually typing the Windows ALT+ codes for each character, which are quiet frankly just cumbersome.

I do a great deal of typing, obviously blogging on a web browser. In my case on Google Chrome, so enter the solution for all of you using Chrome out there (statistically should be the majority of you guys): The Special Characters Chrome Extension.

It's a pretty neat tool to use to insert foreign characters.

Lowdown on how to use it (really simple):

1. Click the add to chrome button
   
2. Right next to the chrome search bar (omnibar) there should be a little button with an accent grave. Looks like this:
   
   
   Click on it.
   
3. Click on wanted character
   
4. Paste where you want to insert it.

Few extra options:

1. Clicking shift gives Capital case characters
   
2. Using number 1 to 4 allows you to copy to clipboard, the 4 recently used characters 

Hope that was somewhat useful.