Character Picker Applet


Table of Contents
Character Picker Applet

Character Picker Applet

Character Picker applet, shown in Figure 1, allows you to easily write many characters which are not available on standard keyboards such as accented characters, certain mathemathical symbols and punctuation, and some other special symbols. To add this applet to a Panel, right-click on the Panel and choose Panel->Add to panel->Applet->Utility->Character Picker.

Usage

First, bring the cursor focus to the Character Picker applet by left-clicking on one of the characters displayed in the applet. Specify the character group by pressing the corresponding key on your keyboard. (For a complete list of the character groups and corresponding keys, see the Section called Characters.) For example, to see the various accented versions of the "a" letter, press "a". After you have found the correct letter or symbol, left-click on it to copy the symbol into the buffer. The character should appear as a depressed button. This is similar to the common Copy command available in many programs. To paste the symbol in any window, just click in the window with the middle mouse button. Most applications which have Copy and Paste features will also allow you to paste the symbol using its Paste command.

NoteISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character support
 

Note that some applications do not support ISO-8859-1 characters. These applications will not display some characters from the Character Picker applet.

NoteCut and Paste in X
 

The X Windows system allows you to copy and paste text by highlighting it with the first mouse button to copy the text and then pasting the text by pressing the middle mouse button. Note that Character Picker uses the same copy buffer as X uses. Thus, when you select a character in the Character Picker it replaces any previous text in the buffer from highlighting text. Similarly, if you have selected a character in Character Picker and then highlight text, the highlighted text will replace the character in the buffer and the character's button will no longer appear depressed.

Right-clicking on the applet brings up a menu containing the following items:

  • Properties… — opens the Properties dialog.

  • Help — displays this document.

  • About… — shows basic information about Character Picker Applet, inluding the applet's version and the author's name.

Customization

You can customize Character Picker applet by right-clicking on it and choosing Properties…. This will open the Properties dialog(shown in Figure 2), which allows you to change various settings.

The properties in the Size tab are:

The properties in the Default List tab are:

  • Default character list — This is the list of characters which will be shown in the applet when you press the space bar. This is a convenient way to keep a list of your most frequently used characters. Just enter your most frequently used characters here.

After you have made all the changes you want, click on OK to apply the changes and close the Properties dialog. Click Apply to apply changes without closing. Close closes Properties without saving changes which have not been applied. Applied changes cannot be cancelled.

Characters

Character Picker applet has all the characters from the ISO-8859-1(Latin 1) character set which are not on standard US keyboards. They are mapped onto the standard characters as shown in Figure 3. The bold characters in the first column of each half and to the left of the dotted lines are the characters you must type in the Character Picker applet to obtain the corresponding characters shown to the right.

Authors

Character Picker was written by Alexandre Muņiz (). Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. (Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line. If you are using GNOME 1.1 or later, you can also use Bug Report Tool (bug-buddy), available in the Utilities submenu of Main Menu, for submitting bug reports.

This manual was written by Dan Mueth (). Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to the GNOME Documentation Project by sending an email to . You can also submit comments online by using the GNOME Documentation Status Table.