OK, so here's a question: How do you actually type in Unicode characters 
that aren't on your keyboard?

It's nice that Unicode exists, and a tiny fraction of software in 
existence even supports it, and approximately 3 fonts in the world have 
the appropriate glyphs in them. But how do you type those?



from there. But that requires an Internet connection, and seems like an 
absurdly long-winded way of going about things...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (For example, I've discovered that if I want to type, say, "ü", I 
can 
> look up the Wikipedia article for "U" and the article for "ü" is l
inked 
> from there. But that requires an Internet connection, and seems like an
 
> absurdly long-winded way of going about things...)

If you know the code number, it's some keyboard escape, like holding down
 
the alt key while typing on the numeric keypad or something.

If you don't, the application under Windows is called "Character Map", an
d I 
think it's under Accessories in pre-Vista windows.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> If you don't, the application under Windows is called "Character Map", an
> d I
> think it's under Accessories in pre-Vista windows.

yep, even Ubuntu got that, same location.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (For example, I've discovered that if I want to type, say, "ü", I can
> look up the Wikipedia article for "U" and the article for "ü" is linked
> from there. But that requires an Internet connection, and seems like an
> absurdly long-winded way of going about things...)

You don't even need unicode for that character, ISO-8859-1 has it.
I type it by pressing shift-´ (which is ¨), then 'u'.

For ñ I simply have a separate key.

On Linux, my keyboard layout has some useful Unicode stuff under AltGr + 
letters. For example “proper quotes” (AltGr + V and B respectively) or the © 
symbol (AltGr + Shift + C).

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Le 31/01/2010 18:05, Orchid XP v8 nous fit lire :
> OK, so here's a question: How do you actually type in Unicode characters
> that aren't on your keyboard?
> 
Depend on your application, i guess.
For instance, vi/gvim have a ctrl-v/u/4hex digit sequence as escape for
inputing such characters (as long as your font support it, and you're in
not in need of the extended pages (after 16 bits))

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Darren New wrote:

> If you know the code number, it's some keyboard escape, like holding 
> down the alt key while typing on the numeric keypad or something.

Sure. But there are zillions of Unicode characters you might want to 
use. (I forget how many accented vowels there are. And then there's all 
the mathematical symbols that somebody like me might use...)

> If you don't, the application under Windows is called "Character Map", 
> and I think it's under Accessories in pre-Vista windows.

Right. I guess that's probably the least clunky way to do things...

And of course, a decent text editor will allow you to bind shortcuts to 
commonly used Unicode characters. [Now to go find "a decent text editor" 
before somebody tells me to start using Emacs. :-P ]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 31-1-2010 19:04, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> (For example, I've discovered that if I want to type, say, "ü", I can
>> look up the Wikipedia article for "U" and the article for "ü" is linked
>> from there. But that requires an Internet connection, and seems like an
>> absurdly long-winded way of going about things...)
> 
> You don't even need unicode for that character, ISO-8859-1 has it.
> I type it by pressing shift-´ (which is ¨), then 'u'.

if you have the right language installed. English in general has not 
much use for ü so that is not default for Andy.

> For ñ I simply have a separate key.
> 
> On Linux, my keyboard layout has some useful Unicode stuff under AltGr + 
> letters. For example “proper quotes” (AltGr + V and B respectively) or the © 
> symbol (AltGr + Shift + C).
>

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:


> > from there. But that requires an Internet connection, and seems like an
> > absurdly long-winded way of going about things...)

> You don't even need unicode for that character, ISO-8859-1 has it.
> I type it by pressing shift-?? (which is ??), then 'u'.

  I don't think the question was if Unicode is necessary to get the
character, but instead how to get the unicode character in question.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> If you know the code number, it's some keyboard escape, like holding down 
> the alt key while typing on the numeric keypad or something.

  Are you sure that supports unicode and not just the system default
character mapping (which in Windows would be that Windows extension to
ISO-Latin-1, at least in western countries)?

> If you don't, the application under Windows is called "Character Map", and I 
> think it's under Accessories in pre-Vista windows.

  Likewise.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> OK, so here's a question: How do you actually type in Unicode characters 
> that aren't on your keyboard?

  You can switch keyboard mappings, you know.

  But I suppose that if you need some special character which is not really
part of any mapping (or any mapping you know or are familiar with), you use
some utility program. Some text editors might have such a feature built in.

  If you are writing HTML (or XML), you can write the unicode value directly
as &#xxxx; (IIRC). Might require proper HTML/HTTP headers for the client
program to interpret properly.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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