Mike Maxwell wrote: > We would like to have some keyboard macros for inserting certain Unicode > characters [...]. We're aware of the Character > Tool, but for frequently used characters it would be useful to have > keystrokes. [...] > > There are two ways this could be done, and both would probably be > useful. One way would be s.t. like Microsoft Word allows, where you > type in the Unicode code point (s.t. like '0x9A4'), and with the cursor > in or immediately after this, hit a key that triggers a macro to convert > the 0x string into the corresponding Unicode character. > > The other would be to bind a key to a particular Unicode character, so > that Shift-Alt-T, say, inserts the 'Bengali Letter TA'.
I would like to suggest a third way: consider having a complete menu for inserting the special characters you need. See the attached example of a character insertion menu I have been using for some special characters. (Extract charactermenu.xxe from the ZIP archive and put it into the "addon" subdirectory of your XXE preferences directory, then open any .xml file and explore the new "Characters" menu. CAUTION: This was last tested in XXE V. 2.11, so I am not sure if it still works.) IMHO, this approach provides the following advantages over using the function insertCharByName or the Character tool: - Organization of the characters in groups you define yourself, so you can easily look up the character you desire by its category instead of having to know its DocBook entity name beforehand. Scales perfectly if you extend the menu to other character groups. - Useful limitation of the characters available in a sub-menu to those characters that (according to your opinion) belong together, while insertCharByName shows all character entity names from the DocBook XML named character entity declarations, corresponding (roughly) to those in ISO/IEC DTR 9573 (2003). (See http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/overview.html for more info.) - "Visually controlled" character selection: the character itself is shown, next to its entity name, in the menu option. - Keyboard shortcuts that "walk you through the menus to your character", while the menus also allow for alternative use of the mouse or the arrow keys. Keyboard-only selection of a character from the menu might allow special character insertion to be almost as fast as with a key combo bound to every special character, but assigning the keys is much more flexible in the menus (just a few keys needed at each menu level; can lookup a key if forgotten; probably more mnemonic assignments). The key sequences in the menus should as well be much easier to remember (and to enter) than Unicode code points that would have to be transformed afterwards. All of the menu is of course fully customizable to suit your needs... Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or remarks. Yves PS: For entering full texts composed of only special characters, rather than using any of the above input methods, why not remap (nearly) all of the alphabetical keys of the keyboard temporarily by means of a kind of turn-on and turn-off macros? (I fear, however, that this might temporarily prevent you from using XXE's standard key bindings.) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: charactermenu.zip Type: application/zip Size: 3632 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.xmlmind.com/pipermail/xmleditor-support/attachments/20070305/78e00f6e/attachment.zip
