On Fri, 16 Sep 2022, John Jason Jordan wrote:
Others have mentioned Ctrl-Shift-u, which gives you the opportunity to enter the Unicode value for the character you want. I need a lot of these for linguistics work, so I made up a little table with two columns, one for the character as it appears and its name, and another for the Unicode hex number. I found a little message utility that pops up my list on the screen whenever I need to see it.
John, That's a good approach and, since I rarely need non-ASCII characters, what I'll do.
But I also added the Compose key to my keyboard which is faster when all I need are normal diacritics for things like ¡résumé! I assigned the Windows key to be the Compose key, so to type an é I hold down the Windows key, type an apostrophe, then type an e, and it comes out é. The only problem with the Compose key is that setting it up disables repeat typing.
The Compose key seems to be tightly associates with the ubuntus; I've not found a way to define it in Slackware (but my LQ question may provide an answer.)
I also added a keyboard for Polytonic Greek, which I can activate by clicking on a little flag in my panel - the American flag changes to a Greek flag or back again, or I can switch it with Ctrl-Shift-Alt.
My more common need is explaining complex ecological/environmental issues to non-technical audiences in plain English. I've not found a keyboard for that. :-) Regards, Rich
