In a recent discussion on the Gnome e-list it has been brought to my attention that in Fedora 13/Gnome the input method for Unicode characters has changed from Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode value to iBus something-or-another. The gist of it, as far as I have been able to determine, is that you will have to use a keyboard layout to type special characters, although there is an option to continue to use Ctrl-shift-u +Unicode value for gtk+ apps provided you launch the app from a special command telling it to use the old way. If your app is not a gtk+ app you're screwed.
I am hoping someone here can shed some light on this, as it is critical to me. For several years I have happily typed characters with combining diacritics for linguistics using Ctrl-shift-u, which delightfully works system-wide in all applications. To get an idea of what I am talking about, look at the character chart for the International Phonetic Alphabet: http://weston.ruter.net/projects/ipa-chart/view/ Pay particular attention to the diacritics, e.g., voiceless, voiced, more rounded, etc. Each of these diacritics can be combined with any of the regular Latin alphabet plus the ~100 special glyphs in the IPA. For example if I need to describe a [b] with a breathy voice (as in Indo-European and many present day languages), I need to type a b followed by Unicode 324, which inserts the breathy voice diacritic under the b [b̤]. There are probably a hundred thousand possible combinations of characters and combining diacritics. Note that there cannot be special all-in-one glyphs with the combining diacritics as there are for Spanish, French, German, etc. because there are simply too many possibilities. No font that I know of contains all the combinations and, even if such a font existed, finding the single glyph that combines the character and combining diacritic that you need would be impossible. Linux has always been better than Windows for linguistics work because Ctrl-shift-u works in all apps. In Windows you can do a similar thing (Unicode value + Alt-x), but it works only in Microsoft Office, not system wide. If you need to work in QuarkXpress, OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect, you have to scroll through an "insert character" dialog box. If I understand the forthcoming changes correctly, Linux with Gnome desktop will soon become worse than Windows for linguistics work. There may be options with KDE or other desktops, but I love Gnome. This is not happy news. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
