On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 10:20 +0200, Craig Bradney wrote: > On Monday 03 October 2005 10:05, Peter Nermander wrote: > > > > the font have them in "proper" locations? My experience with Word is > > > > that it is a real pain to insert special characters from unicode fonts. > > > > (And it's a pain also with Scribus, at least this far.) > > > > > > Why is it a pain? > > > > Becase if the characters are spread out in the font it takes forever to > > write a "word" using Insert->Glyph (clicking and clicking), or you have to > > remember the hex unicode chars. > > > > Of course you can create keyboard shortcuts (at least in MS Word), but then > > you get a non-standard way of inserting them. > > > > For single special characters it's not as much pain, but for IPA I think > > you usually want to write longer words with the special characters. > > So how else would you propose to use them then?
Personally, I'd want to be able to set a keymap to do it. The IPA characters have unicode code points, so it'd simply be a matter of making a custom keyboard layout (either remap the standard keys, use dead keys, or use compose keys). I'm actually a little surprised that there aren't any compose sequences / dead key codes for IPA characters already (or are there?). Failing that, I'd personally be inclined to put together a dialog that implemented the desired mapping, so you typed what you wanted and got the appropriate IPA text in a text field. This shouldn't be overly difficult, and could be done as a C++/Qt plug-in or a Python/PyQt script. You could simply have an "insert" button that shoved the characters into the selected frame at the cursor (though this would rely on the current font having IPA chars at the correct unicode points, of course). -- Craig Ringer
