Entering special characters (mainly dashes)

Hi everyone! I use the Linux SL client most of the time on a box running Ubuntu 7.04 (Gnome 2.18.1). I use non-standard characters fairly often.

I tend to access non-standard characters either by
—Using the "compose" key. (I told X to re-assign one of my keys as compose). In some other applications I can produce an em dash (—) with this by using <em>Compose,-,-,-</em>. In SL I can still use this method for accented characters (çàƒé) but it will not create an em dash.
—Directly entering the hex for the UTF-8 value using ctrl-shift-u-{hex_value}. This doesn't seem to work in SL at all.

Em dashes paste in fine and can be displayed when others use them. Entering these in the Windows viewer with alt codes works fine.


Anyone have any suggestions? I'd like especially to be able to use en and em dashes (ideally easily), but also if possible to be able to directly enter more arbitrary unicode characters.

It's kind of tedious, but the "character map" utility works very nicely for me. (That' what the GNOME menu calls it; the program is evidently called "gucharmap".)

How can I make a heart without having to copy paste one from somewhere else? Is there a way to type a heart in chat w/out pasting one?

Hi there,
Improved Linux support for 'composed' characters from the keyboard will be in either the upcoming 1.18.1 viewer release or the release after that.