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Copy/pasting diacritic marks

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Crush
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 Message 1 of 9
20 April 2012 at 6:40am | IP Logged 
Is there a place with a list of diacritic marks that you can copy and paste on top of the text you type? For example, check out the Wikipedia article on the acute accent. Search for "by an acute accent" (or scroll down to the Russian section under Stress) and you'll see a little tilde just to the right that you can copy and paste on top of other letters. I've been using that to put accents on Russian words (спаси́бо), and i was wondering if there was a list of diacritic characters to copy and paste. I'd really like to follow the Princeton course's style using a little "x" over top to show how stress changes in words.

I also found something on combining characters on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character, but i'm not exactly sure how i could use them.
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Serpent
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 Message 2 of 9
20 April 2012 at 12:21pm | IP Logged 
idk specifically about these, but there's a character map in windows.
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Iversen
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 Message 3 of 9
20 April 2012 at 3:49pm | IP Logged 
As I understand the question Crush has found a way to write a letter and then adding the diacritic to it afterwards through copy and paste, but I can't find that in the articles he refer to. The nearest thing is the concept of 'dead key', where your keyboard has one or more keys which don't give a letter when you press them, but if you afterwards press certain other keys you get a letter with an accent. That's how my own keyboard works.

There are a number of different physical keyboard layouts in the world, but for most you can install a keyboard driver which makes it possible to use it for more or less any other language (and you can of course switch back and forth between the installed options). The problem is that you then can't see the correct letters printed on your keys, so unless you use such a keyboard layout daily you may forget where some foreign letters (with or without diacritics) are placed. For those who need to write in many different alphabets and variants of alphabets this isn't an ideal situation.

If you want to modify an already written character then I don't know to do it through subsequent modification EXCEPT formatting - and if the purpose is to show stress in a language which normally isn't written with accents then I would personally do it with bold or underlined typeface or maybe larger letters instead of an accent. But if you do want an accent then you must have a way to write it directly - even if this means that you have to do it outside your current application.

Copy and paste is of course a possible solution if you have a suitable source. For instance you can replace a common letter with an accented one which you have got from the first of Cruch's links (there are some weird combinations there!). But it is better to have a medium where you can write the characers with diacritics from the beginning, and then you can copy and paste the whole section in one go when it is ready. For this purpose I use the virtual keyboards of Lexilogos, which for some languages with other alphabets even can replace letters on the fly (Greek, Russian). In principle the symbol tables of for instance MS Word gives you the same opportunities, but with all alphabets and graphical signs in play at any one time which makes it somewhat unmanageable in practice - although the list of latest used letters can to some extent alleviate this problem.

So here and now my preferred solution would be an improved version of the Lexilogos model, i.e. it should be able to replace single letters and letter combinations on the fly for all alphabeths and thereby be able to produce all the 'weird' letters in those alphabets, including letters with one or more diacritics.

And somewhere in the future we might be able to get keyboards whose keys adapted to the letters they actually would produce if pressed.

Btw. I just saw in the first of Crunch' two Wikipedia articles that you not only can write certain letters with ALT + a three-letter code, but you can also add acutes by pressing ' + CTRL and then the relevant letter. Nifty little trick which I didn't know.


Edited by Iversen on 20 April 2012 at 3:58pm

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Serpent
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 Message 4 of 9
20 April 2012 at 4:15pm | IP Logged 
I prefer using the abcTajpu add-on. you can have a hotkey which will change the letters in a custom way. for example, i use both ć and ç a lot, so i type c,then F12 for ć and x then F12 for ç.
It's also possible to make your custom keyboard layout (you can use the right ALT+another key...the Finnish layout uses it, for example, so [ ] { } € @ £ $ are all on number keys, along with !"#¤%&/()= if you press shift+the number).
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Crush
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 Message 5 of 9
20 April 2012 at 5:14pm | IP Logged 
What i'm talking about is this: copy the character in between these quotes: " ́"
Now paste that after another letter. It should paste a tilde over top of the preceding letter. I was just wondering if anyone knew of a list of other combining diacritical marks. I'm not on Windows, but i remember that there was a very simple tool for creating new keyboard layouts and adding deadkeys to do exactly what i want. Under Linux, however, i've had a lot more trouble modifying keyboard layouts, and since it's really only for studying vocabulary and not something i will use in conversations, i don't know if it's worth the trouble especially since this copy/paste solution isn't all that inconvenient for me.

I've tried loading up the lexilogos site, but it appears to be blocked in China...

EDIT: Oh, and thank you to you both for your responses.

Edited by Crush on 20 April 2012 at 5:16pm

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LaughingChimp
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 Message 6 of 9
20 April 2012 at 5:15pm | IP Logged 
They're called combining characters. You can find them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character

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Crush
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 Message 7 of 9
20 April 2012 at 5:24pm | IP Logged 
I'd already tried copying and pasting them, but it always added them to the side, i think because it adds a space or something. Anyways, when i tried copying and pasting after placing it between quotes, like this:
" ̽" ___ " ̀" ___ " ́" ___ " ̂" ___ " ̃" ___ " ̄" ___ " ̅" ___ " ̆" ___ " ̇" ___ " ̈" ___ " ̉"

Most of them turned out ok. That first "x" is much smaller than the one used in the Princeton Russian course, but in a large font still readable. Thanks everyone :)
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Serpent
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 Message 8 of 9
20 April 2012 at 8:35pm | IP Logged 
Hehe, a Russian site recommends switching to Linux for typing them easier. The guy just said: the keyword is "xmodmap".

Another seemingly good link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input


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