Font Forum

If someone is trying to key some text in Esperanto into an application which does not have an Insert Symbol facility, is the following pdf useful?

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/t ... eranto.pdf

Here is some test text if you wish to try keying it.

Ĉu neĝas?

It means "Is it snowing?"

Actually I entered the accented characters directly into this post by using copy and paste directly from the pdf as displayed on the web.

However, the pdf can be downloaded to local storage and used locally if so desired.

The page size is one-eighth of A5 portrait, that is 148 mm by 26 mm. The top margin is 5 mm.

William Overington

18 August 2008

Why use a PDF file? Why not just keep the text as an Opera note or as a Unicode text file? If you need it frequently, then make a Custom Windows keyboard that will work in all Windows applications — Notepad, Wordpad, OpenOffice, PagePlus, etc.

Shift 6 is the dead key for circumflex, followed by the base character:

Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŝ ĉ ĝ ĵ ŝ and Â Ê Î Ô Û Ŵ â ê î ô û ŵ

Ctrl Alt Shift 6 is the dead key for breve (this doesn't work in Opera due to some bug, but there is no problem in notepad or wordpad)

Ŭ ŭ

In Opera, you can customise the keyboard shortcuts in Preferences, Shortcuts, Keyboard Setup, Advanced, Edit Widget context, for example:

u alt = Insert, "ŭ"
u alt shift = Insert, "Ŭ"

This gets around the above bug and also works with the standard UK keyboard.

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Why use a PDF file?

I was thinking that if people were going to be making fonts using Scanahand and using characters which are not directly available on the keyboard that some ready-to-use pdfs being available might be helpful.

In fact, I was rather hoping that you might be interested and make a typecase_pali.pdf file to the same format using one of your fonts which supports the characters.

I am not suggesting that using a pdf is the only way to enter characters. I just thought that it seems a convenient method, perhaps particularly for people new to entering characters which are not available on the keyboard.

William Overington

18 August 2008