[Discuss] Followup from InstallFest regarding typing of non-ASCII characters

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

There was an issue at the InstallFest the other day where an attendee
running the latest version of Fedora needed help learning how to type
letters with diacritical marks, and we helped her enable the "Compose"
key for this. It turned out that the setting for enabling the Compose
key had been moved out of the normal settings and into the gnome tweak
tools in the latest version of gnome 3.

However, i just discovered another solution for typing unicode
characters that doesn't use the Compose key. It turns out there's a
key sequence for typing any uncode character using its hexadecimal
code point.

The specific example I ran across was for typing the lowercase pi symbol: ?.

The code point for this character is U+03C0. To enter it, type
Ctrl-Shift-u, then the code point digits, then a space. When you type
the Ctrl-Shift-u, an underlined "u" is displayed, then when you type
the 03c0, that is also displayed underlined. Then when you type the
space, the underlined "u03c0" is replaced with the lowercase pi
symbol.

Actually, you don't need the leading zero, so Ctrl-Shft-u 3c0 Space
will work as well.

A list of Unicode characters can be found on wikipedia, at

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

Some examples from the wikipedia page:

    British pound - U+00a3 - ?
    Degree - U+00b0 - ?
    Paragraph - U+00b6 - ?
    eacute - U+00e9 - ?
    Omega - U+03a9 - ?
    Ellipsis - U+2026 - ?
    Smile emoji - U+1f642 - ??


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email: abreauj at gmail.com / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
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