Enter characters with diacritics and special sorts

Enter characters easily by using mnemonic keys for diacritics; enter characters by their unicode value; enter certain predefined characters.

The script is not useful for typing one particular language such as German or French: for these languages, dedicated keyboards and keyboard layouts are available. However, in much linguistic work, especially in typology, a wide range of characters is required that cannot be captured by a single keyboard layout. The script lets you enter all kinds of combinations of letters and diacritics, even when the combination doesn't exist in the current font (see below for details).

Ideally, the script is assigned to a keyboard shortcut for easy access.

Use

When run, the script shows this simplest of dialogs:

compose screenshot

There are several possibilities.

  1. To enter an accented character, type the character followed by the diacritic key (sort of mnemonic). Use @ for ring; semicolon for cedilla; ^ for the circumflex; u for the breve; _ for the macron (a complete list is shown by pressing Enter/Return with the ?=help prompt displayed). Example: to enter g+breve (ğ), run the script, type gu in the edit field and press Enter/Return. a@ enters the a+ring (å). If the requested character is not found in the current font, the script combines the base character and the diacritic (or tries to, anyway). Using the script it is easy to enter w+tilde or q+acute. Always enter the base character first, then the diacritic.
  2. To enter a character by its unicode value, just type the four-character unicode value and press Enter/Return.
  3. You can choose to enter just a single diacritic: type just the single (sort of mnemonic) diacritic symbol. These are the same as described in 1. To see a list of symbols, press Enter/Return at the ?=help prompt.
  4. Enter Greek characters by typing a Latin letter followed by capital G: aG gives alpha, bG, beta, etc. These keys are case-sensitive: AG gives you the capital alpha.
  5. A number of miscellaneous characters can be entered as well. If you hadn't recognised WordPerfect's compose key yet then you'll recognise it now. To enter an inverted exclamation mark, enter !! and a space; C= and a space enters the Euro symbol, L- and a space the Sterling sign. Dh and dh (each followed by a space) enter Eth and eth; Th and th plus space, Thorn and thorn. A complete list can be seen by displaying the help screen (press ?=help at the script's prompt). You must always type a space at the end because the script assumes that two-character strings are base character+diacritic strings. This is avoided by entering a three-character string.
  6. Combine two characters in a document. Place the cursor after the two characters to be combined, run the script, enter just one backslash and press Enter/Return. This is handy for combining a diacritic with a character which you need to enter separately, such as a phonetic symbol. Thus, to enter a schwa+tilde, enter the schwa and the tilde separately, position the cursor after the tilde, then run the script. Enter \ in the script's edit field and press Enter.
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