On 30 October 2016 at 14:51, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
Paul Moore writes:
My point wasn't so much about dealing with the character set of Unicode, as it was about physical entry of non-native text. For example, on my (UK) keyboard, all of the printed keycaps are basically used.
How do you type the pound sign and the Euro sign? Are they on the UK keyboard? Or are you not in the UK and don't need them?
They are on the keyboard. The £ sign is shift-3, the € sign uses the AltGr key (which is woefully underused on the standard UK keyboard driver - accented letters *should* be available using it :-()
And yet, I can't even enter accented letters from latin-1 with a standard keypress, much less extended Unicode.
I'm pretty sure you can,
Believe me, I've tried. But I should point out that I *don't* count the "official" way (Alt plus typing the numeric code out on the numeric keypad) as a viable option: 1. It only works for the current codepage, I believe. 2. It gets intercepted by applications (I just tried it here, in the gmail webapp, and got dumped out of the site to a google search page, I've no idea why).
You probably have Control, Windows, Menu, Alt, and maybe a "function" key. If you're lucky, one labelled AltGr for "Alternate Graphic" is the obvious suspect. Some combination of the above probably allows entry of accented Latin-1 characters, miscellaneous Latin-1 (eg, sharp S), and a few oddballs (Greek letters, ligatures like oe, the leminiscate usually read infinity).
It doesn't, by default. Specialised programs can customise keypresses, but I'd hate to teach Python to newcomers if I needed something like that. (And by "newcomers" I'd include all of my work colleagues, who are far from computer illiterate...)
For Windows, it seems that Alt+decimal character codes, or hex Unicode followed by Alt+x are the built-in ways to enter characters not on your keyboard. It's also possible to set up "Math Autocorrect" to automatically convert keysequences according to https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2011/08/29/sans-serif-mathematical-... but that's hardly obvious (although maybe it is if you're Dutch?)
And it's application specific - noted in the article, "One way any character can be entered into Word or OneNote (but not into PowerPoint, sigh) is"
I have to wonder why so many people stick with a system that seems to hate its users. :-(
OT, but in my case, because it's very good at making a lot of the key things you need to do easy. It's immensely hostile in many ways, but typically if you're finding that to be the case, you're pretty clearly doing something that's not part of the "core target audience". Like console programs, Unicode outside a specific code page, etc. But if you are sticking to the norm, it's great. A question, though. On Linux, (pick your distribution, but ideally "it doesn't matter") how would I type é, √, ☺ ? Assume any answer that starts with "look up the numeric code" is unacceptable, as is anything that only works in a specific application. I'm willing to accept a need for a one-off configuration of some mapping table to get √, but accented letters and "common" characters like smileys should really be available by default. Assume a qwerty keyboard, something like UK or US layout (because it's the English speakers who need the most help remembering that the whole world isn't ASCII :-)) I doubt it's that much easier than it is on Windows. My ideal is that something like what I defined in the above paragraph *is* the norm, for all computer users. It's just plain silly that English speakers can't type café, or a German friend's correctly spelled name, without effort. Anyhow, this is way off topic now. Paul