Re: Unicode character entry

[Joe Smith <jes martnet com>]

On 05/31/2010 09:43 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> ...
> I am a linguist and I need to type characters from several Unicode
> pages (IPA, combining diacritics, and a few others). Over the years I
> have learned the codes for the characters that I use - for example, if
> I need an esh I type Ctrl-Shift-u + 283. Keyboard layouts are great
> if you need to switch from one language to another, but I cannot use a
> keyboard layout because there are too many characters - roughly 140,
> plus about 20 optional combining diacritics.
>
> If I upgrade my Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, will I still be able to use
> Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode value? If so, do I have to change the default
> settings somehow?

All I can tell you is, after I installed F13, out of the box, the old 
standby, ISO-standard (as Simos points out), Ctrl-Shift-U + Unicode 
digits, did nothing in any apps for me.

I'm still trying to find out whether that is by intention or by accident.

I did find a discussion of this (for F12) here:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236034
which mentioned enabling an input method.

I tried their suggestion: System > Preferences > Input Method, which 
recommended ibus, then I poked around in the preferences there until I 
found "rawcode" which seemed likely. I also configured Ctrl+Shift+U as 
the "Enable or Disable" sequence.

After getting that set up, I can enter characters by a /similar/ process 
as before, but ibus likes to pop-up menus with character choices, and it 
seems to use the same sequence to enable and disable the input method, 
so you have to type Ctrl+Shift+U again to disable ibus or it will start 
up again any time you type a hex digit.

So you can still enter characters by their code point, but it's not 
entirely clear how to configure it, nor is it so simple to use it for a 
character here and there.

You might prefer ibus/rawcode, since you need access to more characters 
and the pop-up prompts it gives might be easier than remembering them 
all. For me, it's a machine gun for a mosquito.

I also tried the environment variable setting mentioned in the forum thread:
GTK_IM_MODULE=gtk-im-context-simple

That gives the behavior I'm used to when I set it for individual 
applications, but I can't figure out where to put it to apply it for 
everything in my session. So far, I've tried both ~/.pam_environment and 
/etc/environment to no effect.

<Joe