User:Michael B. Trausch/Information/GNOME-Unicode
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[edit] Using GNOME and Unicode
Wikipedia, like much of the Internet, uses UTF-8 as a character encoding. This makes life really easy for people who are using systems that are Unicode-friendly, such as GNOME. Please note that I don’t cover KDE or Microsoft Windows here; I would be willing to put up information on those systems, however, if there are ways to easily use Unicode on them when editing Wikipedia.
[edit] Summary
Basically, Unicode lets people enter characters from many different languages, as well as mathematical characters, typographical English characters, and more. This permits people to produce more professional-looking (and correct!) documents. Among the common characters people need to use from Unicode in Wikipedia articles are:
| Character Name | Character | Unicode Code Point (Hex) |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Quotation Mark | “ | 201c |
| Closing Quotation Mark | ” | 201d |
| Interrobang | ‽ | 203d |
| En Dash | – | 2013 |
| Em Dash | — | 2014 |
| Trademark | ™ | 2122 |
| Open single quote | ‘ | 2018 |
| Close single quote, apostrophe | ’ | 2019 |
| Ellipsis | … | 2026 |
| Pi | π | 3c0 |
Full Unicode character sets, by category
[edit] GNOME prior to 2.16.0
To enter Unicode characters in GNOME prior to GNOME 2.16.0, you can enter any Unicode character by pressing (and holding) <LControl>+<Shift>, and then typing u####, where #### is the Unicode character’s code point. For example, to type the Ellipsis, you would press:
- <LControl>+<Shift> u2026
And then let go of <LControl> and <Shift>. Using these older versions of GNOME can make life a little difficult if you enter Unicode characters frequently, because the left hand gets somewhat cramped holding Control and Shift down.
[edit] GNOME 2.16.0 and later
In the newer versions of GNOME, you can press <LControl>+<Shift>+u and then let go of all three, and then type the Unicode code point. This saves your left hand some crampage, at least on a regular US-style keyboard layout.
[edit] “Buggy” User-Agents
Some user agents (web browser software and the like) do not render all Unicode characters properly. I have heard reports that some browsers such as Opera mobile have difficulty properly rendering things like the em-dash connected directly to words. Wikipedia is not here to fix these bugs; if your device or web browser is not showing characters in Wikipedia pages that are Unicode/UTF-8 encoded, please contact your vendor to request a fix. Pages on Wikipedia should aim to become closer to established style, not further from it to work around rendering issues.
That having been said, if your browser has a problem, you might want to consider switching to one that renders correctly. Firefox on Ubuntu or Windows is a good example of software that can render the UTF-8 characters properly.
[edit] Improvements, Suggestions
I am open to suggestions and improvements on this page. Please feel free to make any modifications directly; any vandalism or otherwise bad-faith edits will be addressed just like in the Main namespace.
