[scribus] help writeup for the Character Palette

[ZASKE Martin]

Dear list,

here is my first draft of the writeup. I am surprised myself that it got
so long, for such a small window...

Yet, considering the usefulness of that little tool, and the fact that I
neither was able to guess about the drag-and-drop option nor found any
other documentation about the .ucp files, I submit my text to your
feedback, before I finish it and submit it to bugtracker, as Christoph
had advised. I will probably remove the numbering of the steps (a., b.,
c.) to stay with the style of the other help documentation. It helped my
writing and might be useful for your feedback.

Thanks, Martin


Here is:

Using Character Palette

Character Palette is a feature for users who frequently need to insert
certain special characters into their documents. It can be found in the
"Insert" menu, at the menu entry "Glyph..." This menu item is only
available, when a text-frame is selected and the edit-mode is active,
i.e. when a cursor is visible within a text-frame. Another way to use
the Character Palette is to call it from the Story Editor by way of the
"Insert" menu and the menu entry "Insert Glyph...".

When the Character Palette first gets called, it will appear as a
mini-window with an empty palette of six empty slots. Using the
Character Palette is easy: Just double click on any character, and it
will be inserted at the cursor in your active text.

There are three ways to get your own palette populated:

1. populating by way of the "Enhanced Character Palette":
a. From the Character Palette mini-window click on the top-left "table"
button to open the Enhanced Character Palette.
b. Inside the Enhanced Character Palette select the font of your choice.
c. Now find the character you want and drag and drop it to any slot in
the Character Palette.
d. If you drag to an empty slot, the drop is obvious. If you drag to an
already populated slot, the new character jumps to the next empty slot;
you can have more than six slots populated, new slots get created
automatically.
e. Please notice that in certain contexts you cannot drag and drop a
character, which is already in your Character Palette, even if you
selected another font (see method 3 for a solution, or try closing and
re-opening the Enhanced Character Palette).
f. No need to save your new palette before you close the mini-window.

2. populating by way of the "Unicode Search":
a. From the Character Palette mini-window click on the button which
shows some beastly footprints with a magnifying glass to open the
"Unicode Search".
b. Type any search pattern and hit Enter. If you are not familiar with
the naming of Unicode characters, just type a space and hit Enter, to
see a long list of examples.
c. Once your search brings up a name which seems right for your needs
(you cannot see them at this stage), either select it and hit Enter; or
just double-click it. This will put your selected character into your
Character Palette, into the next free slot; unless that character was
already present in your Character Palette. If you do not like the
character, right-click it to select delete and search again.
d. You will notice that the Unicode Search does not give you a choice of
fonts; each new entry will be in a default font (for example Arial
Regular in Scribus 1.4.3 on Windows 7). See method 3, if you need other
fonts.
e. No need to save your new palette before you close the mini-window.

3. populating by editing the underlying file:
a. Character Palette is using simple text files with .ucp extension for
configuration. It seems the encoding of that file does not matter, as
characters are only referenced by code point and by font name.
b. A good way to start, is populating a fresh example palette by way of
method 1., not forgetting to select the font of choice: Get a fresh
Character Palette by clicking on the top-right "new" button. Now open
the Extended Character Button and drag and drop at least one character
to your palette. Next click on the "save" button (second from the right)
and pick a file name and location (for example My_Palette.ucp).
c. Now open that file with your preferred text editor.
d. You will see that comment lines are available and start with the
character "#"
e. Each palette slot takes one line in the config file.
f. First in each line is the code point of the character in decimal
form. You might be more used to see the classic hex notation for
Unicode. For example U+20AC for the "Euro Sign". Just convert hex 20AC
into decimal (8364) and write that into the config file.
g. After the code point there should be one space, followed by the exact
name of font (no quotation marks). If you are unsure about the font
name, use one of the font-selection drop down lists in Scribus, for
example in the Extended Character Palette; or drag and drop examples. If
the font name is giving more detail in brackets, include that too.
h. Now you know how you can have your most needed Characters ready for
inserting in several different fonts; just have a line each in your
config file.


Once you got your own Character Palette populated by either method, you
can use the "save" and "open" and "new" buttons to manage one or more
palettes or work directly with the config files. Normally you never need
to click save, except when you want to store a palette under a new name
or in a new location. In a Linux OS you might find that the provided
default palette is stored in your home folder, most likely inside a
hidden folder which has a name starting with a dot (.scribus). Look at
your file-browser settings about how to make this visible. But you are
entirely free to store your palettes in any location which is convenient.

The last note about management is about deleting individual characters
from your palette: Just right click it in your mini-window and you will
have the option to delete. No need to save before you close the mini-window.


---end of draft text



-- 
ZASKE Martin
responsable GʊGʊ
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