Re: [PLUG] Thunderbird questions

Hi,

On Oct 1, 2018, at 5:24 PM, Alan McConnell <alan@his.com> wrote:

Of course! Use them as you like. But I suggest always using
them via HTML entities, or via standard Unicode chars.
          Yes, but I gotta learn how to enter them using TB. Unicode is just a prescription,
          which can be implemented in various ways. I need to learn how TB does it. Up to
          now the examples I've given simply come from a file of examples I've put together,
          which I have to call up from one of the terminal windows I have open.

Fred’s been doing great answering your questions, and in fact has answered this one as well but I wanted to emphasize what he said. How you enter text is dependent on your operating system, not the specific operating system. Sometimes that means it’s easier to do a web search for the character you need and copy-paste it in to your document. Sometimes you’ll be using a markup/typesetting language that allows you to enter such characters through some other means (LaTeX’s \ss or HTML’s ß). Other times you can directly enter the literal ß through your operating system, which seems to me to be the preferred method in moat cases. This is easiest if you have a keyboard supporting those characters directly, but can be done even with a standard keyboard. In olden times (like 5-10 years ago), I couldn’t use characters like é or — and needed to work around it, but now I can spell my friend’s names correctly in email because the available character sets support those expanded characters (even if getting my keyboard to reproduce them is sometimes a struggle).

The problem is that how exactly to do so varies with which desktop environment you’re using and other supporting utilities. Ubuntu has some documentation for using GNOME, (https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/tips-specialchars.html.en), this random site (https://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/) has an overview of several environments including KDE and GNOME. Most of these revolve around mapping the compose key or directly entering the Unicode character number (see also https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1416999).