A tip for inserting special characters easily into OpenOffice.org documents
Saturday, May 21 2005 @ 04:18 AM EDT Contributed by: glosser
NewsForge offers help with OpenOffice.
OpenOffice.org lets you process multiple languages within the same document easily, as long as you use only the characters your keyboard offers you. Anything beyond that requires you to Insert > Special Character. This is acceptable, as long as you don't need to enter too many of these special characters. This article discusses a convenient way to mix two or more languages in small amounts, as with single words or single characters.
Imagine you're an academic writing a book about Vietnam. The Vietnamese writing system is based upon the Latin script, but it's enhanced with a load of diacritic marks on top of or beneath the characters. OpenOffice.org would require you to use two different keyboards -- an English one and a Vietnamese one. Another possibility would be to memorize the all the keys from the two keyboard settings and regularly switch the keyboard character map depending upon the language you are about to write.
Switching frequently between two languages gets annoying quickly. Microsoft Word has a handy feature to make working like this much smoother. In Word you can customize the command keystrokes to your needs, and you can make Word enter a special character by pressing a combination of keys.
OpenOffice.org also lets you customize key commands to your needs, but at first sight, it appears to lack the capacity to link special characters to specific keystrokes. But there's a handy workaround to this problem: You can link macros to a combination of keys. And by using OpenOffice.org's built-in macro recorder, you don't even need to know anything about how to design macros using OpenOffice Basic, the macro language shipped with OpenOffice.org.
