Re: Unicode character entry

[John Jason Jordan <johnxj comcast net>]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 02:36:36 +0300
Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com> dijo:

>The purpose of IBus is to accommodate special scripts with complex
>writing rules, which are a handful, such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese
>and Burmese.
>All other scripts, such as anything Latin-based, Cyrillic, Greek,
>Thai, Arabic, etc stay for the foreseeable future with the default
>input method, based on GTK+ (for gtk+ applications).
>Apart from Fedora, Ubuntu uses IBus if the user specifically selects
>to write in one of the 'complex scripts'.
>
>IBus does not replace what you get with gtk+ so I would not consider
>the 'non-IBus' input method as old. The precise wording would be that
>IBus is special, and is to be used for those cases that require
>complex writing systems, such as Chinese.
>
>IBus replaces something called SCIM.
>
>The keyboard layouts found in System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layouts come
>from the X.Org project (generic GUI project for Linux systems) and are
>used by default by both GNOME and KDE applications. GNOME applications
>have Ctrl+Shift+U, and I think that KDE applications have a similar
>shortcut, which are independently implemented.
>Both GNOME and KDE programs can be switched so that they work with the
>IBus input method (select in Settings and re-login), which in this
>case the System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layouts are replaced with the
>IBus keyboard layouts.

I am confused because I have no idea what iBus is, or any of the other
components mentioned.

I am a linguist and I need to type characters from several Unicode
pages (IPA, combining diacritics, and a few others). Over the years I
have learned the codes for the characters that I use - for example, if
I need an esh I type Ctrl-Shift-u + 283. Keyboard layouts are great
if you need to switch from one language to another, but I cannot use a
keyboard layout because there are too many characters - roughly 140,
plus about 20 optional combining diacritics.

If I upgrade my Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, will I still be able to use
Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode value? If so, do I have to change the default
settings somehow?