I have never used the Ctrl-Shift-u technique to enter text. My wife is Japanese so I have her system set up to use Anthy which is an IME for japanese. Before we had to use scim as a backend to Anthy but with 10.04, that changed to the iBus back end. It still works like it used to, but better. We use KDE not Gnome, but I will try it out to see if I can find any difficulty. If you can give me some more examples, I will be happy to try them out.
Jason On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:43 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
