For entering non-ascii characters, I use three techniques:
(a) when the characters are part of a set used routinely, e.g.
the alphabet of French, install a keyboard map specifically
for that language (or, e.g., for ISO-8859-1, which includes it);
(b) at the other extreme, when the character is some random character
for which I have a one time need, use gucharmap, or, what is
often quicker, look it up in my copy of the Unicode Consortium
file Nameslist.txt (http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt)
and enter the character via its hex code using any of several
methods depending on where I want to put it.
(c) for the intermediate case, of characters that I use with some
frequency but that aren't part of some language's writing
system or where it isn't convenient to switch to a separate
keyboard, I use a character entry utility of my own, available
at: http://billposer.org/Software/CharEntry.html
This works something like gucharmap, but instead of presenting
all of Unicode it provides clickable charts of selected sets of
characters: (a) the consonants of the International Phonetic
Alphabet; (b) the IPA vowels; (c) a large set of roman letters with
diacritics; and (d) a set of combining diacritics. There is also
a widget that accepts hex codes. You can also define custom
clickable character charts by reading a definition from a simple
text file (basically each line consists of the hex code and
the gloss to appear in the tool tip).
Bill
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
