Re: Unicode character entry

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 22:50 -0700, Dylan McCall wrote:
> > I found some advice to use ibus instead, but so far I've not been
> able to
> > get ibus to do what I need without having it interfere with my
> normal
> > typing. I just need a quick way to type common symbols found in
> English text
> > (e.g. an em-dash).
> 
> Well, as a workaround, I suggest you stop torturing yourself with
> memorized character codes and configure a compose key! In Gnome, that
> can be turned on with Keyboard Preferences / the Configuration button
> in the Layout section. Unfold the Compose Key section, and pick one. I
> use Right Alt. (Sorry, I'm not in front of a Gnome desktop right now
> so I can't be any clearer).
> 
> Now you can input a special character by pressing the compose key,
> followed by two characters that you think would combine to form it.
> For example, Compose + o + c creates ©.
> Your em-dash is compose + minus + minus.
> 
> Basically anything you could possibly want is there, including opening
> / closing quotation marks, fractions, some math symbols, super /
> subscripts, and accented characters. 

The compose key is awesome, and I use it frequently. But it
does not enable anything you could possibly want. It might
contain everything you need if you only need Latin languages.
Unicode is really, really big.

/me wishes the compose key table were (easily) user-configurable.

--
Shaun