[PLUG] Changes in Gnome Unicode character input method

Jason Barnett jason.barnett71 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 1 07:21:24 UTC 2010


I have never used the Ctrl-Shift-u technique to enter text.  My wife is
Japanese so I have her system set up to use Anthy which is an IME for
japanese.  Before we had to use scim as a backend to Anthy but with 10.04,
that changed to the iBus back end.  It still works like it used to, but
better.  We use KDE not Gnome, but I will try it out to see if I can find
any difficulty. If you can give me some more examples, I will be happy to
try them out.

Jason

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:43 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>wrote:

> In a recent discussion on the Gnome e-list it has been brought to my
> attention that in Fedora 13/Gnome the input method for Unicode
> characters has changed from Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode value to iBus
> something-or-another. The gist of it, as far as I have been able to
> determine, is that you will have to use a keyboard layout to type
> special characters, although there is an option to continue to use
> Ctrl-shift-u +Unicode value for gtk+ apps provided you launch the app
> from a special command telling it to use the old way. If your app is
> not a gtk+ app you're screwed.
>
> I am hoping someone here can shed some light on this, as it is critical
> to me. For several years I have happily typed characters with combining
> diacritics for linguistics using Ctrl-shift-u, which delightfully works
> system-wide in all applications.
>
> To get an idea of what I am talking about, look at the character chart
> for the International Phonetic Alphabet:
>
> http://weston.ruter.net/projects/ipa-chart/view/
>
> Pay particular attention to the diacritics, e.g., voiceless, voiced,
> more rounded, etc. Each of these diacritics can be combined with any of
> the regular Latin alphabet plus the ~100 special glyphs in the IPA. For
> example if I need to describe a [b] with a breathy voice (as in
> Indo-European and many present day languages), I need to type a b
> followed by Unicode 324, which inserts the breathy voice diacritic
> under the b [b̤]. There are probably a hundred thousand possible
> combinations of characters and combining diacritics. Note that there
> cannot be special all-in-one glyphs with the combining diacritics as
> there are for Spanish, French, German, etc. because there are simply
> too many possibilities. No font that I know of contains all the
> combinations and, even if such a font existed, finding the single glyph
> that combines the character and combining diacritic that you need would
> be impossible.
>
> Linux has always been better than Windows for linguistics work because
> Ctrl-shift-u works in all apps. In Windows you can do a similar thing
> (Unicode value + Alt-x), but it works only in Microsoft Office, not
> system wide. If you need to work in QuarkXpress, OpenOffice.org or
> WordPerfect, you have to scroll through an "insert character"
> dialog box.
>
> If I understand the forthcoming changes correctly, Linux with Gnome
> desktop will soon become worse than Windows for linguistics work. There
> may be options with KDE or other desktops, but I love Gnome. This is
> not happy news.
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