Re: Inputting characters with specialist diacritic marks in emacs

[Joost Kremers <joost.m.kremers@gmail.com>]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> "B. T. Raven" <btraven@nihilo.net> writes:
>
>> By far the easiest and mnemonically most intuitive
>> way of inserting exotic glyphs is with an input
>> method. If you put this line:
>>
>> (fset 'im-lat [?\C-x return ?\C-\\ ?l ?a ?t ?i ?n ?-
>> ?p ?o ?s ?t ?f ?i ?x return])
>>
>> into your .emacs you can invoke the latin-postfix
>> method with M - im-lat and have access to
>> å ä ö Å Ä Ö plus about 180 other diacritic
>> combinations from all the languages of Europe that
>> use the Latin alphabet, and including £ ¥ €
>>
>> then you can toggle back and forth to and from your
>> previous input method with C-\
>
> That may be a good idea if you have the need for 180+
> "diacritic combinations" but if you only need å, ä, ö,
> which are *not* exotic in Swedish but common vowels
> like any other, this is far too slow and to change
> input method at that - no good.
>
> For but a few chars that are used all the time the
> compose key is the best solution: fast, no toggling,
> and every (other) char remain the same - no blocking
> or interfering with whatever else you use.

Actually, Latin-n input methods generally don't intefere with anything.
I generally turn on latin-9-prefix when I type Dutch or German and keep
it on. There's no need to turn it off, unless for some reason I need
another input method. (IPA, X-SAMPA and TeX are ones I use from time to
time. They are more intrusive, esp. the first two: it's not possible to
have them on while typing normal text.)


-- 
Joost Kremers                                   joostkremers@fastmail.fm
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)