On Sun, 2006-29-01 at 09:52 +1000, Jean Hollis Weber wrote: > > Good idea, but... > I have never been able to *find* the em-dash or en-dash in the > Special Characters list, and I can't find anything about it in > the Help (which talks only about the AutoCorrect method of > inserting dashes), so your method doesn't work for me. I suspect > that the vast majority of OOo users would have the same problem. > > If you can tell me where the dashes are, that would be a great help.
I believe that an en-dash is 173 on the extended ASCII encoding table, while an em dash is available under General Punctuation as Unicode 2014. This information, of course, pre-supposes that you are using a font that is at least partly Unicode compliant; many aren't. You might also look into converting to a UTF-8 keyboard locale so that you can type all special characters rather than picking them one at a time out of a dialog window. UTF-8 can be annoying if you're a touch typist, because you have to relearn a few keystrokes, and, unfortunately, OOo doesn't seem to support the Control keys that can give you access to a full range of symbols. However, the effort is still worthwhile, especially if you're like me and always feel vaguely embarrassed by not being able to easily spell people's names with the right accents and diacriticals because you're using an English locale. OOo help gives a somewhat murky account of how to setup keyboards for typing special characters. I've pieced together how to enable UTF-8 on Linux, if it's not already used, and the article will be appearing on Newsforge on February 6. I haven't bothered changing the locale on Windows, since I rarely do use it these days, but I imagine that you can probably find some instructions on the internet without much trouble. -- Bruce Byfield 604-421.7177 Burnaby, BC, Canada http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
