On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 03:29:57PM +0100, Franco Martelli wrote: > On 26/01/24 at 20:50, David Wright wrote: > I'll give a shout-out for Hack,¹ > which I can't fault for use in > xterms. Comparing xterm -geometry 80x25+0+0 > -fa hack -fs 16 > with xterm -geometry 80x25+0 Sangu verification: > ⓘ No issues found, please report it if otherwise > Request analyst action Verified by Sangu > On 26/01/24 at 20:50, David Wright wrote: > > I'll give a shout-out for Hack,¹ which I can't fault for use in > > xterms. Comparing xterm -geometry 80x25+0+0 -fa hack -fs 16 > > with xterm -geometry 80x25+0+0 -fa inconsolata -fs 18 > > (to make the sizes roughly the same), I find the inconsolata > > stroke width on the basic Roman alphabet is a little spindly. > > > > Other criticisms are that the stroke widths (and even the size) > > later in the table (eg 0x256–1312) are thicker or larger, and > > many single-width characters are slightly oversize and get > > truncated at the top & right (eg Ŵ at 0x372, Lj 456). Mixing > > fractions is ugly, too: ½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞. The ‘’ quotes > > are pretty, though. > > Those symbols are very nice, which tool have you used to insert them? > I'm using Thunderbird for my emails but I've to enable "Compose message > in HTML" to have a small subset of symbols, for me isn't enough. I'm > using KDE desktop. > > Thanks in advance, best regards.
I bet this has come up before. I'll tell you what I did to solve this. For the most part, I use Debian on servers and I access them through a windows desktop, so for me, the solution starts on Windows. There's different keyboards you can configure on windows but none of them get you at arbitrary unicode characters. What I did do was use a program named kbdedit which allowed me to craft a key mapping for my keyboard so I could create the various keys I wanted to use, and for the characters that I don't use regularrly, I just copypaste the code from either a web page or from kbdedit into the window, be that putty or ms word. What I did was create a heavily compose-key key mapping. I use the right hand alt key as the compose key. So for me ½ is simply alt-1 2. The accented letters like é is just alt-e '. Is there a way to create a similar keyboard mapping in X-windows on debian based systems? I've often wondered what a "full unicode keyboard" might look like. Unfortunately composing only gets you so far. There's definitely some common characters you can do by composing 2 characters logically but it's far far from complete. I do wonder if someday we'll see larger physical keyboards with some extra keys at the top to eventually access all characters via some logical interface rather than having to know their unicode code point. Michael Grant
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