User:Michael B. Trausch/Information/GNOME-Unicode

Using GNOME and Unicode
Wikipedia, like much of the Internet, uses UTF-8 as a character encoding. This makes life really easy for people who are using systems that are Unicode-friendly, such as GNOME. Please note that I don’t cover KDE or Microsoft Windows here; I would be willing to put up information on those systems, however, if there are ways to easily use Unicode on them when editing Wikipedia.

Summary
Basically, Unicode lets people enter characters from many different languages, as well as mathematical characters, typographical English characters, and more. This permits people to produce more professional-looking (and correct!) documents. Among the common characters people need to use from Unicode in Wikipedia articles are:

Full Unicode character sets, by category

GNOME prior to 2.16.0
To enter Unicode characters in GNOME prior to GNOME 2.16.0, you can enter any Unicode character by pressing (and holding) +, and then typing u####, where #### is the Unicode character’s code point. For example, to type the Ellipsis, you would press:
 * + u2026

And then let go of  and . Using these older versions of GNOME can make life a little difficult if you enter Unicode characters frequently, because the left hand gets somewhat cramped holding Control and Shift down.

GNOME 2.16.0 and later
In the newer versions of GNOME, you can press ++u and then let go of all three, and then type the Unicode code point. This saves your left hand some crampage, at least on a regular US-style keyboard layout.

“Buggy” User-Agents
Some user agents (web browser software and the like) do not render all Unicode characters properly. I have heard reports that some browsers such as Opera mobile have difficulty properly rendering things like the em-dash connected directly to words. Wikipedia is not here to fix these bugs; if your device or web browser is not showing characters in Wikipedia pages that are Unicode/UTF-8 encoded, please contact your vendor to request a fix. Pages on Wikipedia should aim to become closer to established style, not further from it to work around rendering issues.

That having been said, if your browser has a problem, you might want to consider switching to one that renders correctly. Firefox on Ubuntu or Windows is a good example of software that can render the UTF-8 characters properly.

Improvements, Suggestions
I [mailto:mike@trausch.us am open] to suggestions and improvements on this page. Please feel free to make any modifications directly; any vandalism or otherwise bad-faith edits will be addressed just like in the Main namespace.