Yves Forkl wrote: > > It is pity, however, that some actions can only be performed with the > mouse and will disrupt keyboard usage. Most notably this concerns > functions that are not found in any menu (a fact which in itself might > be considered a kind of UI flaw, too), especially the Character Tool. > When working with a lot of special characters, it is very painful to > leave the keyboard each time in order to pick and copy a character (e.g. > into the search field) using the mouse. Defining an individual insertion > command for each of the characters and binding it to a key is not always > feasible; what is worse, pasting the character into the search field > can't be done this way (or via macro command at all), AFAIK. > > Short of making all of the Character Tool's functions available on > keystrokes (or via menu options?), why not provide a command on a > keystroke that accepts the digits of a Unicode codepoint and "returns" > the corresponding character, always inserting it at the caret - no > matter if the caret happens to be within an element's text node, an > attribute value, the search field etc.? >
Personally, I type "Esc Shift-C m d a s h ENTER" to insert the mdash character for example. (The dialog box supports auto completion, so "Esc Shift-C m d SPACE ENTER" should be sufficient.) Excerpt of the customize.xxe file found in the add-on called "A sample customize.xxe": <!-- =================================================================== Inserts at caret position a character specified using its entity name. Add parameter="[DocBookIfNone]" to use the character entities defined in the DocBook 4.4+ DTD, but only if the DTD/schema of the document being edited does not define its own character entities. Add parameter="[DocBook]" to always use the character entities defined in the DocBook 4.4+ DTD, whatever is the DTD/schema of the document being edited. =================================================================== --> <binding> <keyPressed code="ESCAPE" /> <charTyped char="C" /> <command name="insertCharByName" parameter="[DocBookIfNone]" /> </binding> It works for *all* document types. Of course, you can rebind the macro to another keystroke. You can also define your own set of special characters if the character entities defined in the DocBook 4.4+ DTD are not sufficient. See http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/commands/insertCharByName.html Of course, this does not solve the problem of typing special characters in Search fields or in attribute values.
