How does one add text in a nonlatin alphabet?

Thread: How does one add text in a nonlatin alphabet?

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How does one add text in a nonlatin alphabet?
	2006-01-21 03:12:45
jayshachter writes: > it, I am sure), I then popped up the scrollable list of fonts > to select a nonlatin font. What font you use in the GIMP's text tool is irrelevant for the input of characters. Sure, a font might not contain those charaters you try to display, but changing font doesn't affect the input of characters at all. > I reasoned that Frank-Ruehl might be employing the ISO-8859-8 > encoding, in which characters 0 thru 127 map on to the US-ASCII > character set, and the Hebrew characters are mapped on to > hyperascii characters, ranging from 128 to 255. You reason wrong. All fonts used by the GIMP on Windows use the Unicode encoding. No fonts on Windows use any ISO-8859-* encoding. (It's possible that one might find 3rd-party fonts produced by amateurs, which for instance have Hebrew glyphs where Latin letters should be, so that instead of 'a' there is an alef etc. Or something like that. If you output text in the Latin script ("ASCII", "English") with such a font it comes out in Hebrew letters instead. This is a horrible hack and such fonts should be avoided.) At least on XP, some seemingly run-of-the-mill fonts like Arial and Courier New include Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic characters. I think Microsoft Office comes bundles with a version of Arial, called Arial Unicode MS or something like that, that contains even more scripts. > This insight, though, even if true, was of no practical use to me, > as I could not figure out how to input hyperascii characters from > the keyboard. (There is nothing called "hyperascii";, please don't invent new terminology needlessly.) To easily input characters other than those on your physical keyboard, you have to switch keyboard layout. These instructions are for XP: Go to the Control Panel, open the Regional and Language Options, select the Languages tab, click Details. Click Add to add new keyboard layouts. You can then switch between keyboard layouts with a hot key (see Key Settings on the same dialog), or by selecting from the keyboard layout icon on the taskbar. (It might be that for the above dialogs to be accessible, you must have selected something in another place in the Control Panel or when installing Windows; please look around!) In GTK+ applications like the GIMP you can also input arbitrary Unicode characters by inputting the code point for the character directly in hexadecimal: press shift and control, and type four hex digits (0-9, A-F), release shift and control. In applications using the Microsoft widgets ("Common Controls"), you can input arbitrary Unicode characters by inputting the code point in decimal. This does not work in GTK+ applications. Press Alt, press 0 on the keypad followed by the code point value in decimal, using the keypad digits. Using decimal is a bit silly, as the universally used notation for Unicode characters uses hexadecimal, for example: U+05D0 (Hebrew letter alef). Decimal values for Unicode characters are very rarely used. But to input an alef in Wordpad, for instance, press Alt and type 01488 on the keypad (hex 05D0 = dec 1488). (If you leave out the initial zero, the decimal value is a character number in the current codepage instead. Codepages are a thing of the past. Unicode is universal.) --tml