Hussein Shafie schrieb: > 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 [...], especially the Character >> Tool. [...] > > 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.)
Thank you for recalling this way of entering special characters, which can be of a great help in some circumstances. Its major drawbacks are, however: - The user must install the addon "A sample customize.xxe" beforehand. - It is limited to the set of entities that DocBook (or the document's DTD) defines, which may lack quite a bit of Unicode's characters, and depends on knowing the entity names chosen (but it has become much easier with XXE displaying the character together with the name in the list since some time). - As you confirm, it won't help in search fields, attribute values and (supposedly) anywhere else outside of the document window. Now, in most or all of these places, I am probably able to paste the clipboard content using Ctrl-v. So the problem resumes to getting the desired character into the clipboard. Currently, the only way to do this (when you don't want to use the mouse) seems to follow this ridiculous procedure : switch the focus to the document window, insert the character there, then cut it out immediately (or rather copy it, then undo the insertion), switch the focus back to where you came from and paste the character there. All this could be avoided if the Character Tool could 1) be reached via a menu, and 2) allowed for keyboard-only operation when selecting characters, copying them, putting them into the favorites etc. Or if there was a general-purpose Unicode character insertion function, allowing insertion everywhere. Which workaround could you think of that would allow me to copy an arbitrary Unicode character to the clipboard, using the keyboard only? > 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 That page mentions the possibility of defining character entities in a Java[TM] properties file, which sounds interesting. Unfortunately, in the MathML example given its not very clear how the command insertCharByName makes use of the new entity names defined: When the properties file has "CircleTimes=\u2297", where do I refer again to this name? The examples only show the usage of insertCharByName with other parameters, like InvisibleTimes, or no one at all. What did I miss here? Yves
