Re: Unicode character entry

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Joe Smith <jes martnet com> wrote:
> On 05/31/2010 09:43 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> 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?
>
> All I can tell you is, after I installed F13, out of the box, the old
> standby, ISO-standard (as Simos points out), Ctrl-Shift-U + Unicode digits,
> did nothing in any apps for me.
>
> I'm still trying to find out whether that is by intention or by accident.
>
> I did find a discussion of this (for F12) here:
> http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236034
> which mentioned enabling an input method.
>
> I tried their suggestion: System > Preferences > Input Method, which
> recommended ibus, then I poked around in the preferences there until I found
> "rawcode" which seemed likely. I also configured Ctrl+Shift+U as the "Enable
> or Disable" sequence.

I am not familiar with Fedora.
In Ubuntu, in System/Administration/Language support there is an
option for 'Input method'.
If you leave it empty then the default gtk+ input method is selected
(called 'Simple' when you right-click in a text editor). If you set
the environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE to an appropriate value
(gtk-im-context-simple), then Simple is selected (supports
Ctrl+Shift+U).

In the forum URL there is a mention about 'XIM'. XIM is X Input Method
which is the most basic (and probably primitive) input method,
provided by the X server. With XIM, applications bypass any input
methods from GTK+, and currently Ctrl+Shift+U does not work. You would
not need to worry about XIM unless you configured it yourself.

> After getting that set up, I can enter characters by a /similar/ process as
> before, but ibus likes to pop-up menus with character choices, and it seems
> to use the same sequence to enable and disable the input method, so you have
> to type Ctrl+Shift+U again to disable ibus or it will start up again any
> time you type a hex digit.
>
> So you can still enter characters by their code point, but it's not entirely
> clear how to configure it, nor is it so simple to use it for a character
> here and there.
>
> You might prefer ibus/rawcode, since you need access to more characters and
> the pop-up prompts it gives might be easier than remembering them all. For
> me, it's a machine gun for a mosquito.
>
> I also tried the environment variable setting mentioned in the forum thread:
> GTK_IM_MODULE=gtk-im-context-simple
>
> That gives the behavior I'm used to when I set it for individual
> applications, but I can't figure out where to put it to apply it for
> everything in my session. So far, I've tried both ~/.pam_environment and
> /etc/environment to no effect.

This should work after a logout/re-login, or better, with a restart.
You can verify if the variable is set with

   echo $GTK_IM_MODULE

Hope this helps,
Simos