Bill Mallon wrote:
> Mark-
> I hope this question isn't too trivial for you. I write
material about > the Olympics and for the International Olympic
Committee and have been
> hampered by lack of support in ASCII for many of the foreign
> diacriticals. Unicode is a perfect solution. I do have
Microsoft Word > 2000 and Visual FoxPro 6.0 which is how I
input most of the data. Is > there any shorthand way to insert
a Unicode character in those programs
> short of going into Insert->Symbol, and choosing the
appropriate
> Unicode?
As Edward Cherlin indicated, it's really necessary to know more
details about what's needed. Keyboards provided with Windows
may have the necessary characters, though (not knowing what
languages he is working with) Bill might need to switch
frequently among many.
EC>Have you activated the International keyboard that comes
with
Windows? It provides for typing letters with six diacritics
(acute, grave, circumflex, dieresis, tilde, ring). Look in the
Keyboard control panel.
Edward: I'm not familiar with "the International keyboard". Do
you mean activating "multilingual support", which allows
support for multiple keyboard layouts?
Janko Stamenovic mentioned his keyboard generator, which works
on Win95 and Win98. It's important to be aware of certain
limitations on those operating systems: there is no way to send
an application a Unicode character code from an input method;
it is only possible to send an 8-bit character code (or
sequence of such) which an app can then translate to Unicode
via a codepage. (Well, actually, it would be possible to
develop a proprietary solution in which an app can get Unicode
characters from an input method manager, but that involves a
proprietary app, and won't work for Word.) Janko's solution
will only work provided there is a codepage that includes the
needed Unicode characters, and a given keyboard layout can
access characters from only one codepage. As far as I can tell
from looking at the shareware version of his program, it can
only work with one particular codepage, the default system
codepage. On Bill's system, that probably means cp1252 (the
so-called "US ANSI" codepage). This may or may not include the
characters Bill is looking for.
Chris Fynn mentioned the Tavultesoft Keyboard Manager
("Keyman"). This tool allows you to write your own keyboard
description. It can include dead keys, use of control keys,
context-sensitive rules - it's very powerful. Version 5 will
support generation of Unicode characters, but it works only on
WinNT/2000. Version 4.x works on Win95/98, but it has the same
limitation I mentioned for Janko's program of relying on the
default codepage (Keyman was originally designed to be used
with non-standard "hacked" fonts). Version 5 could be a very
good choice, if Bill is using NT.
Hope this is of help.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:57 EDT