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.
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