I have searched all the font How-To's and online sites I could find and
cannot find the answer to this question. Can anyone help?
How do you enter nonkeyboard characters into something like KWord? By
"nonkeyboard characters," I mean accented letters, fractions, em dashes,
bullets. true typographic apostrophes and quotation marks, opening
single quotation marks, and so forth. In Windows you hold down Alt and
type the character code number and you see the character on screen and
in your printed output. What do you do in X, KDE, and Gnome? I know
about the character maps for KDE and Gnome, but "click and copy" is a
completely impractical way to deal with extended characters. Surely
there must be ways to type extended characters on the keyboard.
I think it's passing strange that NOWHERE does any documentation mention
this. Moreover, I looked through the entire Linux book section at Barnes
and Noble and not one book had such a thing indexed. Even the 1600-page
monsters had exhaustive sections on networks, consoles, Emacs, kernel
building, yada-yada, but NOTHING WHATEVER on how to get a damn extended
character typed!!
Related question: how do you get a character set other than ISO-8859-1?
That set is useless for document creation because it does not include
essential typographic characters such as true quotation marks and true
apostrophes. Without these characters, letters, reports, and other
documents look amateurish and ugly. Surely there must be some way to get
a proper character set in Linux.
I do have my own Type 1 fonts and some TrueTypes installed and they are
showing up--except not yet in StarOffice or WordPerfect. I am also in
process of trying to dump the fonts that came with the system that I
don't want. I have TrueTypes for screen display, but I prefer to use
Type 1 for creating and printing documents. StarOffice includes
directions for getting more fonts into it. The downloadable version of
WordPerfect 8 apparently does not include the font installer utility, so
you seem to be limited to the fonts that come with the program. If that
is the case, I'll remove it from my system. Worthless!
Answers to my questions most gratefully received!
--Judy Miner
