Shortcut Character Keystrokes

[Mr_Bean]

I need to write essay's that require a lot of special font/character inclusions to allow for Pali and Sanskrit. In MS Word, I could just identify the characterrs I wanted and create a specific "shortcut keystroke" such as CTRL+ALT+A to insert it quickly and save messing about by going through a manual insertion via the Symbol board.

Is there a facility to do this in Neooffice? I haven't found it yet.

[yoxi]

There's no direct way to do this like the one you describe in MS Office - you have to create a macro for each character and then assign that macro to a particular keystroke - fiddly but possible. Alternatively, if you're typing romanised Pali/Sanskrit you could use a font like the redoubtable URW Palladio HOT which has all the characters with accents mapped onto the keyboard itself, and then you just need to remember where the hell on the keyboard they are! I don't have the link handy (just heading off to work) but the author of the font lets you use it if you're an academic, so give it a try. It's also a great font because it's one of the few that has european accents as well as asian ones so you can type in French and Pali without having to switch fonts.

I hope this is of some use. If you're going to have to go the 'macro and shortcut' route, I'd be happy to help you, as I've already done some of that myself.

- yoxi

[edit] If you're doing a lot of this work you could also set up a new unicode keyboard layout using an app like Ukelele so you could assign your own 'character set' to a keyboard layout, and then you just switch keyboards when you want to tyope in your alternative characters. This is also a little fiddly to set up, but very convenient in the longer run. When I'm back this evening, I'll add some links in here!

[OPENSTEP]

Another possibility might be to try to use the autotext functionality to put in your special characters. Granted, it's not a single key combination since you'd need to type the abbreviation and then hit F3 (oh so intuitive, eh?) but it might save you the time of going to the special character insertion dialog during typing.

You can read up more about the autotext stuff in the online help and probably get some more hints from the oooforum.org boards.

ed

[sardisson]

Another option might be to use the Unicode Hex Input keyboard layout (which is basically a standard ASCII Roman layout but is capable of entering all the characters in the Unicode standard via opt+their hex code).

Smokey