Re: How to insert symbols into emails (was: Re: Monospace fonts, Re: Changing The PSI Definition)

[Bret Busby]

On 29/1/24 22:54, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

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. Comparingxterm -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.


Easy. I configured my CAPSLOCK key (which is useless IMO) 


With the CAPSLOCK key, I simply get a special switchblade style knife 
that I use as a letter opener, and use the point to remove that 
particular key, as I have found the key to be harmful.



Bret Busby
Armadale
Western Australia
(UTC+0800)
.

Re: How to insert symbols into emails (was: Re: Monospace fonts, Re: Changing The PSI Definition)

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 03:54:44PM +0100, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 03:29:57PM +0100, Franco Martelli wrote:
> > Those symbols are very nice, which tool have you used to insert them?
> 
> Easy. I configured my CAPSLOCK key (which is useless IMO) to be
> my X compose key. So entering COMPOSE-4-5 does ⅘, and COMPOSE-<-3
> does ♥. You can even define your own compose seqs, like I did with
> ♀ (COMPOSE-o-+) and others.

This is documented at  by the way.

Re: How to insert symbols into emails (was: Re: Monospace fonts, Re: Changing The PSI Definition)

[Michael Grant]

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. Comparingxterm -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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Re: How to insert symbols into emails (was: Re: Monospace fonts, Re: Changing The PSI Definition)

[tomas]

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. Comparingxterm -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.

Easy. I configured my CAPSLOCK key (which is useless IMO) to be
my X compose key. So entering COMPOSE-4-5 does ⅘, and COMPOSE-<-3
does ♥. You can even define your own compose seqs, like I did with
♀ (COMPOSE-o-+) and others.

The nice part is that it works for /all/ X11 applications, even
in a plain old xterm (I'm writing this mail in vim in an xterm).

Cheers
-- 
t


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How to insert symbols into emails (was: Re: Monospace fonts, Re: Changing The PSI Definition)

[Franco Martelli]

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. Comparingxterm -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.

--
Franco Martelli