From: T.A. MCALLISTER (ecl6tam_at_lucs-01.novell.leeds.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Nov 18 2003 - 06:22:48 EST
There are lots of different ways to enter Unicode characters. Methods
involving typing code-numbers or clicking on characters in dialogue-
boxes are fine for individual, rarely-needed characters, but they are
very labour-intensive if you need characters frequently and/or lots of
different languages.
For that, it's much easier to use a key-mapping utility such as
Microsoft's (freeware) Keyboard Layout Creator. (A slightly better
one is Keyman, version 5 of which is freeware for educational use, but
Abiword doesn't seem to work with it yet.) There are several similar
programs, mostly shareware.
It's not hard to invent your own keyboard layouts. I use deadkeys,
one for each accent (e.g. forward-slash followed by any letter
produces that letter with an acute accent, if it can take one; back-slash
for grave accent, and so on). With that method it's easy to type any or
all of the Latin-alphabet languages with a single keyboard layout; no
more of that tedious switching to the AZERTY keyboard to type
French, then having to use the QWERTZ layout for German, then back
to English, and never being able to touch-type because you're never
sure which keys A, Y and Z are on at any given moment.
That method is also easy to remember: all acute accents are controlled
by one dead key, all graves by another, etc, so it's pretty intuitive. You
can type all of the Western European languages using only 7 dead
keys: Acute, Grave, Umlaut, Circumflex, Tilde, Ligature, and "Other".
A single similar mapping can cope with all the Cyrillic-alphabet
languages.
I must admit that some languages are a challenge: even Microsoft's
Greek Polytonic keyboard does a lousy job of typing Ancient Greek.
Alec McAllister
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