[Scribus] Linux Font Editor?

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 10:20 +0200, Craig Bradney wrote:
> On Monday 03 October 2005 10:05, Peter Nermander wrote:
> > > > the font have them in "proper" locations? My experience with Word is
> > > > that it is a real pain to insert special characters from unicode fonts.
> > > > (And it's a pain also with Scribus, at least this far.)
> > >
> > > Why is it a pain?
> >
> > Becase if the characters are spread out in the font it takes forever to
> > write a "word" using Insert->Glyph (clicking and clicking), or you have to
> > remember the hex unicode chars.
> >
> > Of course you can create keyboard shortcuts (at least in MS Word), but then
> > you get a non-standard way of inserting them.
> >
> > For single special characters it's not as much pain, but for IPA I think
> > you usually want to write longer words with the special characters.
> 
> So how else would you propose to use them then?

Personally, I'd want to be able to set a keymap to do it. The IPA
characters have unicode code points, so it'd simply be a matter of
making a custom keyboard layout (either remap the standard keys, use
dead keys, or use compose keys). I'm actually a little surprised that
there aren't any compose sequences / dead key codes for IPA characters
already (or are there?).

Failing that, I'd personally be inclined to put together a dialog that
implemented the desired mapping, so you typed what you wanted and got
the appropriate IPA text in a text field. This shouldn't be overly
difficult, and could be done as a C++/Qt plug-in or a Python/PyQt
script. You could simply have an "insert" button that shoved the
characters into the selected frame at the cursor (though this would rely
on the current font having IPA chars at the correct unicode points, of
course).

--
Craig Ringer