How do you insert common symbols ?

[m_pav]

Theoretically, it should be possible to insert any symbol if you know the ALT Code sequence for it but despite using Linux since 2002, I have never once been successful inserting a symbol like © ® 🄯 ✓° °C using the Alt key. The symbols in this string are copied from a PDF I keep in my Documents.

When I try for instance to get 2 arrows pointing towards each other, like this → ←, using the supposedly correct alt codes Crtl + Shift + U + 0152 and 0153, I get this, Œ œ

How do y'all get the right codes to work?

[chrispop99]

I've never managed to make the ALT codes work in Linux, so I install and use KCharSelect.

Chris

[dolphin_oracle]

I normally only need things like this in documents, so I use the symbol insert tool in writer.

[Rizlaw]

You can insert symbols by using the following website:

https://fsymbols.com/keyboard/windows/alt-codes/list/

or

https://symbl.cc/

I keep these sites bookmarked when writing Conky templates. Hope it helps.

[m_pav]

Ahh, I was using the wrong codes. 2192 is the → arrow and 2190 is the ← arrow. If these things are supposed to be standards, then how the hang did I come across such a whack list? It's no wonder they weren't working for all these years. Shoulda gone to Wikipedia.

Ctrl + Shift + U prints a U to the cursors position, (uppercase or lowercase doesn't matter), then the hex number and a <return> inserts the symbol.

I'm a terrible tpyist at the best of times, and reaching for the mouse to insert a character is yet another trip hazard for me, especially in Winter when they're cold. I'm so glad its finally warming up here.

[b3ta]

My solution

I either use the Unicode values that I've committed to memory (via the key sequence Ctrl+Shift+U followed by the hex value of the key, followed by either Enter or Space), or I use the compose character approach. Because my home keyboard is a TKL size, I don't have a number pad, so I couldn't enter Alt key combinations even it were still possible.

I run Xfce, and the way I use it is to run:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option compose:sclk

upon start-up (via "Session and Startup > Application Autostart").

That makes the Scroll Lock key your compose key. Once it's installed and configured as above, pressing "Scroll Lock" followed by the "<" character followed by the "-" character yields ←.

I find it mostly intuitive, but there are some compose sequences that are quite hairy. See my semi-humorous diatribe on KDE, below.

As an aside, my TKL keyboard doesn't have a Scroll Lock key, so I use "keyd" with this line in "/etc/keyd/default.conf"

Code: Select all

leftcontrol+leftmeta+leftalt = scrolllock

That makes the kernel interpret the combination Left Control + Left Win Key + Left Alt as Scroll Lock. Then the above setxkbmap call interprets the (fake) Scroll Lock as the compose key.

Ramblings

Using Alt combinations goes back to the days of DOS. It was actually the BIOS that interpreted the key sequence, because DOS used the BIOS keyboard interrupt. The numbers used were the decimal equivalents of the ASCII key codes, so Alt+065 (on the key pad) generally yielded "A". What was displayed differed depending on your code page, so that could change.

I know, because I wrote a TSR program that caught Ctrl+Alt+Del and first dumped debug info to a file before allowing the machine to reboot. It was an absolute bummer to debug in development, because every time it didn't work you lost everything. Back then the assembler code for the BIOS could be obtained legally (in a very thick lever arch file), and that eventually helped me to solve it. I was so excited that I woke my wife to tell her, but it was completely lost on her, being after midnight, not that I think the daylight would have made much difference ;-)

KDE

These days the DE you use can also play a role. Here are my notes on exactly this before I eventually gave up on KDE, though not because of this problem. It's quite long, but it does demonstrate the issue in KDE. These notes are from 2022, so they might have fixed this problem by now.

[I've not translated from the original Markdown format of these notes, so it doesn't look that great, but I need to get to bed.]

Composing ‘extended’ characters

Those folk who live in the same parish (see ‘parochialism’) as the people at ANSI who decided on ASCII all those years ago may not think that this is much of an issue, but for those of us who live in other countries or who communicate with people from other countries (international projects, anyone?), this is a ROYAL PAIN. One usually ends up using less than ten of these characters in a particular context, and in time you find you commit their codes to memory. That's the reality when dealing with multiple languages and computer keyboards. Unicode standardised this whole lot, so to have the ability across UIs and OSs to access these characters by their codes is important. Sure, on Windows press these keys, on Mac those before you enter the codes, but on Linux… well, are you in GNOME, KDE, using LibreOffice, …?

This is a real pain in KDE Plasma, as you cannot use Unicode values, even if you know them. Instead you have to “compose” the character in question. In theory that sounds great, until you have no idea what the composition looks like.

First you need to tell KDE what you'll be using for the compose character. Do so via System Settings > Input Devices > Keyboard > Advanced > Position of compose key. I chose Scroll Lock, as it is available on the external keyboards I use as well as on the laptop directly, and it is a key I don't use for anything else.

Now that's done, when I press Scroll Lock, then what I press thereafter will create a composed character if it was a valid sequence (see below). These are usefully [!] listed in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose. The thing is, there are over 5,890 of them in the file on my system! Worse, there is no mention of their Unicode values, as they are listed by name, so good luck finding the key combination you require for, say an s with an upside-down circumflex. I use it as example, as a friend of mine of Eastern European extraction has one in her name and I want to write her an ‘instant’ message.

This is how I did it:

Run KCharSelect
Choose European Scripts and start looking through the lists, in which the font size is really small, by the way. On my laptop screen it's really difficult to see the difference between Ē, Ĕ, and Ě at the font size used, so I have to click on each to see a larger representation.
Is it in Basic Latin? No.
Is it in Latin-1 Supplement? No.
Is it in Latin Extended-A? Ah, yes; there we go!
Click on it to discover that it is described thus:

Code: Select all

    Character: š U+0161
    Name: LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON

    Annotations and Cross References

    Notes:
         Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, and many other languages
    Equivalents:
         ‎s U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S ‎̌ U+030C COMBINING CARON

    General Character Properties
    Block: Latin Extended-A
    Unicode category: Letter, Lowercase

    Various Useful Representations
    UTF-8: 0xC5 0xA1
    UTF-16: 0x0161
    C octal escaped UTF-8: \305\241
    XML decimal entity: š

So, under ‘Various Useful Representations’, this KDE program (remember, KDE won't let you use codes to enter extended characters) lists — yes, you guessed it — the codes used to enter this character. Thankfully it does give the name (‘LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON’), so now I can run grep "LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON" /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose to see which keys to press after (in my case) Scroll Lock to get KDE to succumb and display the character I need. Let's give it a go:

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grep "LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON" /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
<dead_caron> <s>                        : "š"   U0161 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
<Multi_key> <c> <s>                     : "š"   U0161 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
<Multi_key> <less> <s>                  : "š"   U0161 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
<Multi_key> <s> <less>                  : "š"   U0161 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
<dead_abovedot> <scaron>                : "ṧ"   U1E67 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<Multi_key> <period> <scaron>           : "ṧ"   U1E67 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<dead_abovedot> <dead_caron> <s>        : "ṧ"   U1E67 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<dead_abovedot> <Multi_key> <c> <s>     : "ṧ"   U1E67 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<Multi_key> <period> <dead_caron> <s>   : "ṧ"   U1E67 # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<dead_caron> <sabovedot>              : "ṧ"   U1E67               # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE
<dead_caron> <dead_abovedot> <s>      : "ṧ"   U1E67               # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON AND DOT ABOVE

Um…

Well, the first four lines are the ones I am interested in (I don't want a dot above), but how to interpret the bit before the colon? I don't know what a ‘dead caron’ is (that famous Monty Python sketch comes to mind), but the <Multi_key> ones might mean ‘press your compose key, followed by what is between the angle brackets’.

Let's give it a go:

Code: Select all

<Scroll Lock> <c> <s>    : š
<Scroll Lock> <less> <s> : š
<Scroll Lock> <s> <less> : š

Yes!

For the fun of it, I also tried this, since I've experienced that the order of the keys after the compose key doesn't matter for other composed characters I have used:

<Multi_key> <s> <c> : <beep>

Mmm… so order does matter here. Oh well, I'll go with < and s in either combination, so I don't have to remember a permutation.

I shudder to think what ‘normal’ users are expected to think of Linux when they have to go through all of this just, for example, to type a ΰ. I copied and pasted that, because I don't know which keys to press for this recipe: <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <dead_diaeresis> <Greek_upsilon>. The character is called ‘GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH DIALYTIKA AND TONOS’ and its Unicode value is U03B0. I have an idea that if I want to communicate with my friend Nikos and need to use one of these, I'd have to resort to copying and pasting in my KDE environment because all 11 ways of getting this character require a Greek keyboard to begin with: my keyboard doesn't have the <Greek_upsilondieresis> key, the <dead_diaeresis> key, or the <Greek_upsilon> key, but if I were allowed to enter the Unicode code, it would be the simple matter of using the code. Who knows? I might even remember it.

In conclusion, trawling through forums it is clear that the community has been desperate for years to have the ability to use the Unicode codes when entering extended characters. Keep the current compose approach, but please: add the ability to enter the codes as well. Until then, sorry Nikos.

[fan_of_LTS]

When I had to use Windows at work I needed lots of these symbols and typed the ALT codes without needing to think about it. When I came to LInux I expected a decent little app like the old Character Map in older versions of Windows. It is surprising that this is still an issue.

[linuxbobtas]

@fan_of_LTS, there are at least two reliable Unicode character-picker apps for Linux:

gucharmap (in the repositories; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Character_Map)
kcharselect for KDE (also in the repositories; see https://apps.kde.org/kcharselect/)

I don't need all the special characters these offer and I find they break my typing flow. As an alternative to Crtl+Shift+u+code-point I wrote a script some 10+ years ago that I still use regularly. Please see https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-03-24.html.

Hope that helps.

[Stuart_M]

I rarely use special characters but when I do I will use one of two ways:

The first way is used almost 100% of the time. I open a blank LibreOffice Writer document and use the "Insert Special Characters" button that gives three options (see below Screenshot). The first two options allow selecting a special character from a list in the "Favorites" or "Recent" categories. The selected character will be inserted on the open document. If I want to use the character elsewhere I simply copy it from the document to paste it elsewhere.

These are the three options:

• "Favorites"
  There are currently eight buttons that show eight special characters to choose from.
• "Recent"
  There are currently 12 buttons (the maximum) for 12 special characters to choose from.
• "More Characters..."
  Choosing this options will show all the special characters LibreOffice has to offer, listed by font and subset (e.g. Basic Latin, etc.).
  Many more options are available, e.g. removing a Recent or Favorite Character(s), searching for a character, entering the hexadecimal U+number for a special character, etc.

This is a Screenshot that shows the "Insert Special Characters" button on the LibreOffice Writer Tool Bar (mouse pointer is on the button):

LibreOffice_Special_Characters_button.png

The second way I used is for the VERY unlikely event that I cannot find the special character from the LibreOffice method, which is to use https://copychar.cc/ which is the best web-based special character list that I have found. It has 10 different categories with each clearly showing many special characters. Clicking a special character will automatically copy it. There is a lower-case "i" to the right of the Search field that will toggle between a standard special character view and a view with the character name and its hexadecimal number (U+nnnnn).

[m_pav]

@Stuart_M Holy schmoley, that copychar site is definitely a keeper.