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

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

All of these methods are useful for typing the less common characters. But
if you have a frequent need to type letters with accents and umlauts, a
better method might be to change to a different keyboard layout that
enables dead keys. The easiest one for US users to deal with is the US
International layout, which keeps all the letters and punctuation in the
usual places but activates special handling of some characters such as '
(apostrophe / accent acute), ` (accent grave), ~ (circumflex), ^ (tllde),
and " (double quote).

Using that keyboard does take some learning, because if you actually want
the character rather than using it to accent the next character you
sometimes need to type a space (which will be swallowed) after it. You only
need the space if the next character is one that can be affected by the
accenting character. So, for example, it's needs nothing special because S
doesn't take an accent, but its'a does because ' + a becomes ?.

You almost certainly want to switch back to the standard layout when you
are typing code. Dead keys just get in the way.

There is another variant called International with AltGr dead keys. That
one leaves the behavior of those five characters alone, activating it only
if you hold down the right Alt key while you type the dead key. That one
requires less relearning of normal typing habits and doesn't get in the way
of typing code, but it's less convenient for typing accented characters.
It's probably better for casual use but not as good if you're typing a
non-English language that uses a lot of accents.

Here are the accented letters you can get. This may look like gibberish to
people who are not using a Unicode-capable mail reader.

':  ? ? ? ? ? ?
`:  ? ? ? ? ?
": ? ? ? ? ? ?
~: ? ? ?
^: ? ? ? ? ?

There are additional characters that you can get while holding down the
right Alt key (or the AltGr key if your keyboard has one of those; none of
the common keyboards in the US do) while typing various punctuation
characters:

1 = ?
2 = ?
3 = ?
4 = ?
5 = ?
6 = ?
7 = ?
8 = ?
9 = ?
0 = ?
- = ?
= = ?
[ = ?
] = ?
; = ?
' = ?
, = ?
/ = ?

And a few that also use shift:
+ = ?
: = ?
"= ?
< = ?


On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 12:16 PM John Abreau <abreauj at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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