Why do you think I have this outrageous accent?

Wherefore Character Picker?

From the time that I installed Linux on my home computer, I was somewhat miffed that there was no way that I could find to surrepetitiously include accented characters when entering text. Since I need to be able to use an "ñ" to write my name properly, this situation was particularly intolerable. I later installed Gnome, and was impressed by the usefulness and screen-space economy of many of the applets that had been written for the Gnome panel. It occured to me that the problem of picking an accented character was precisely the sort that could be best solved by such an applet. In contrast to the Windows 9x Character Map, a panel applet is small enough that it cannot get in the way of the target application, (where you intend to paste the character,) and because it is always present, you can use it any time that it occurs to you to use an accented character, without having to take extra time to find and launch a seperate program. [Update, June 2000: Later I discovered that xmodmap can be used to make a compose key, which is a much better solution, but in the mean time, I've learned a lot about GTK+/Gnome programming, and once GTK supports Unicode, I think my applet may have a viable purpose; composing works well with a small character set, but it will never handle a significant portion of Unicode.]

This gave me a good excuse to learn something about programming with gtk+, and the result is Character Picker. The current version of Character Picker is 0.05; and is part of the recently released gnome-applets 1.2.1 package. (If you are using a version of Gnome previous to 1.2, I strongly suggest upgrading; there are an enormous amount of new features and enhancements.) The best source for information on changes to the program is the ChangeLog on gnome cvs.

Screenshots

The best way to show how this works is with pictures, so here is a screenshot of my Gnome panel, with several applets, including my character picker applet:

Here is the properties dialogue box:

Depending on your window manager, gtk theme, and panel setup, your installation of character picker may look slightly different.

Installing and using Character Picker

Character Picker is part of the gnome-applets package; check the Gnome website for information on how to install Gnome. To run Character Picker once it is installed, right click on the panel, then choose Add applet->Utility->Character Picker from the menu.

To use the Character Picker, you can type a letter to get all accented versions of that letter. Only characters in the ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) character set are present. If you are using something else as your native character set, Character Picker may behave strangely. (You will probably need to click on one of the buttons before typing to give the applet focus.) Then click on the button with the character you want. This selects the character so that it may be pasted into other X applications. Some non-standard punctuation characters are available too; this needs to be better documented, but you can play around and type different characters until you find something interesting for now. :)

To Do's, Bugs, and one Non-bug:

When the applet has focus, it should give some indication, probably by changing the X cursor to the text input cursor. (The "I" shaped one.)
One character (the degree symbol,) is still not available.
A couple of people have asked for the ability to be able to incease the priority of accents in languages they are interested in, or to remove languages for which the accents are already on their keyboards. I plan adding this eventually, but it will take a fair amount of code to dynamically create the character lists that are statically defined now, and to set up the UI to set language priorities from. In the long term, I'd like to support Unicode, and it would be vital to be able to choose languages of interest, to bring some order to the overwhelming number of characters in the Unicode character set.
The non-bug is that, if you type a capital "Y" you get a lower-case "ÿ" in the list. This is because the ISO 8859-1 character set has only the lowercase "ÿ". OK, it is a bug, but it's not my bug.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Patches?

Please send email to me, Alexandre Muñiz, at munizao@xprt.net if you have any of these. Character Picker is licensed under the GNU GPL, so feel free to take advantage of your rights under that license. If you have cvs write access please notify me, (or better, send a patch,) before committing any changes.

Acknowledgements:

Many thanks to everyone who has worked on making gtk and gnome what they are, especially George Lebl, maintainer of the gnome panel, and author of the Fish applet, from which I borrowed a lot of code to get this project started, and Owen Taylor, who is an amazing gtk hacker and who helped me out with gtk selection mechanisms. The properties dialog and session management code was adapted from the modemlights applet by John Ellis and Martin Baulig. Dan Mueth wrote the documentation, and the gnome translation team has translated it to many languages. The soundtrack to writing this page has been The Dark Years by 17 Reasons Why. The soundtrack for my June 2000 remix of this page is Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Aphex Twin.

This blatant self-promotion is part of my Web Thing.