On 15-Sep-10 20:08:46, Chris G wrote:

I recently wanted to put a degree symbol (as in ˚ hopefully) into some text and it took me ages (as in several minutes) to find the character in the Character Map application.

Is there any quick/clever/easy way to find a character like this? In the Character Map you get swamped by Chinese/Cyrillic/Arabic script characters which you *know* are not what you want. Is there a way to see just 'roman' text characters plus special symbols etc.?

Or can anyone suggest another way to find this sort of thing more easily? Chris Green

This in part depends on what you;re using to edit your text. Since I always use 'vim', here's an outline how I would try to find it (if I didn;t already know).

1. Start vim: $ vim

2. Enter the characters (a command to vim in its "command mode"): :dig

You will then be presented with a slew of characters with associated codes. You will find the degree symbol at No 176:

NO ¬ 172 -- ­ 173 Rg ® 174 'm ¯ 175 DG ° 176

This indicates that its numerical position in the encoding is 176, and its "vim digraph" is "DG" (for "degree", just as "NO" is for "logical NOT", "Rg" is for "Registered", "'m" is for Macron accent).

3. Now go into "insert node" by entering the character "i" and now you can start entering text. To enter a digraph, first type Ctrl-K and then the two letters of the digraph. So if (in insert mode) you type

The temperature at RAF Marham at 17:00 today was 12<Ctrl-K>DGC

you should see:

The temperature at RAF Marham at 17:00 today was 12°C

It doesn't take long to learn the digraph codes for the symbols you use regularly, and in doing so you also learn to guess what the code might be for something new.

Other software can take a similar approach. For instance, if you use groff for formatted document preparation (as I do), then the various characters available in your installed PostScript fonts can be named in similar ways as you enter your text plus markup. Thus the above sentence would be typed

The temperature at RAF Marham at 17:00 today was 12[de]C

where the character "degree" has the groff name "de" and is invoked (like other named characters) using "[name]". When groff is run using your text file as input, it will generate the formatted output, e.g.:

groff -Tlatin1 > test.out << EOT The temperature at RAF Marham at 17:00 today was 12[de]C EOT

and then 'vim test.out' and you will see it as above (your raw CLI console may not display the degree symbol).

Just thoughts. To come back to the question: The degree symbol is one of the 256 "extended ASCII" characters, so you only need to look at the first 256 (and indeed only at those with codes above 128, since it does not belong to standard ASCII).

Ted.

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