From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Tue Apr 14 2009 - 14:14:40 CDT
William_J_G Overington wrote:
> One simply does a copy from the pdf to the clipboard of the character
> that it is desired to use and then a paste to the document that is
> being prepared and then one formats to the desired font and point
> size.
Using copy and paste is OK for casual needs of entering characters, but why
would you do such clumsy methods for something as common as normal
punctuation? I have (half-seriously) coined a law on entering Unicode
characters: There Is Always A Simpler Way. If you need something very often,
you should take some trouble in making it easy. That is, invest some time to
save time in the future.
For example, you could define (or ask someone define for you) a keyboard
settings where the key with the " character produces “ when used as such
and ” when used with AltGr key. Or something like that. Similarly, you could
replace the underline _ (which is rarely needed in normal prose) by the en
dash –. When you write computer code where the Ascii " is needed, you simply
switch to “normal” keyboard settings (e.g., Ctrl+something).
Alternatively, use a text processing program that automatically converts "
on keyboard input into language-specific quotation marks. Actually, many
people use that approach without knowing (though they often have wrong
language settings and consequently get wrong quotation marks, but that can
be fixed).
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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