Mathematicians need to input many different characters (arrows,
equal signs, operators, latin letters, greek letters). Unfortunately,
a keyboard is too small to have a key for every mathematical
character. LaTeX uses names for every non-ASCII character, for example
\alpha for α. The input methods you find here try
to generalize this idea. They allow you to use such names to input
Unicode characters in all applications.
Download all my methods and tools as tarball.
Most of the following input methods are written for the m17n library. Any application using this library should thus be able to use these methods. I actually use the software iBus under Linux. iBus has an input engine that uses the m17n library. With iBus, you should be able to use these input methods with nearly any X11 application. Furthermore, there is also SCIM which can also make use of m17n is is available for Linux. Unfortunately, I do not know whether iBus, SCIM or m17n also work on other operating systems than Linux (using X11). However, I am sure that for windows and for the mac, there are similar ways to reach the same goal. Please inform me if you know more. If you have a question that is not answered here, feel free to contact me.
Here I tell you how I installed SCIM and my input methods on a Debian Linux Etch system. For other Linux distribution it might be different. Most important, not all distributions use im-switch, I guess.
First, install the packages im-switch, scim, scim-m17n and their
dependencies. (Perhaps you are also interested in scim-modules-table
and scim-tables-additional which hides a small table for a LaTeX-like
input method.) Under debian etch, one uses im-switch to change the
input method to scim. This can be done as a normal user, if you want
to make the change only for this user. You can also call it as root,
this changes the default for all users.
Call im-switch -s scim. If you
have problems and want to make this change undone, you can
call im-switch -a to revert to default.
Now, start a new X session. This creates a file
~/.scim/global. Open this file in an editor, and look out
for the line beginning with /SupportedUnicodeLocales. If
it does not exist, create it. Here you have to list all the Locales
you use. In my example, the line is
/SupportedUnicodeLocales = de_CH.UTF-8. (By the way, it
is recommended to use an UTF8 locale.) Now close the X session and
start a new one. SCIM should be working now, i.e. there should turn up
SCIMs symbol in you task list, or at least, hitting CTRL+Space in an
application should show scims control panel. Now, open SCIMs
configuration dialog and remove all input methods you do not want to
use.
The last step is to install my input methods. m17n looks in the
directory /usr/share/m17n for its database. There I
simply have put a symbolic link to the mim-file for my input method
which I keep in my home directory. This of course does not work for
other users that do not have access to my home directory. I do it
this way, because like this, it is easy for me to modify the input
method. You can also put the mim-file directly into
/usr/share/m17n. (Perhaps you do not like this and rather
want to put it under /usr/local/share/m17n. I do not know
whether this works automatically, but I think that you have to modify
/usr/share/m17n/mdb.dir, i.e. add something like
(input-method * "/usr/local/share/m17n/*.mim") or
similar. However, I do not know whether this works since I have not
tested it.) Now, after starting a new X-session, the
new input methods should be available in SCIM.
Are you trying to use my Swiss-German Math method and it does not
work? In this case you probably have the same problem as I had. I
encountered this problem on my amd64 system but not on my x86 laptop.
Somehow it seemed that SCIM did not correctly hand over keyboard
events to m17n. xev is a good tool to find out which key
events are generated. According to
a
post on the m17n mailinglist, one can do the following in order to
inspect what happens between SCIM and m17n: Start an X session and do
killall scim-launcher. Be aware that this probably kills
running X applications. Now restart SCIM like this:
MDEBUG_OUTPUT_FILE=/tmp/m17n-log MDEBUG_INPUT=1
GTK_IM_MODULE=scim gvim Of course, you can use another
application instead of gvim, another editor for example.
Now hit the keys you are interested in a few times. The file
/tmp/m17n-log then reveales the symbol names that are
handed to m17n by SCIM. The fun thing is, that after doing that and
restarting the X session, it worked.
The installation on lenny works mainly the same way as for etch.
However, you will have to create the file ~/.scim/global
yourself. The Swiss-German Math method should work right away as long
as you set the Keyboardlayout in the SCIM configuration dialog to
"unknown".
Here follow different flavours of input methods for mathematics. However, they are badly synchronized. It is very possible that in one method you can't find a character that is present in another. Also, they are in an early stage. You will surely miss many characters but, of course, you can add additional characters yourself.
At first, I had the idea that one should be able to automatically create a personalized input method. For example, one prefers the names from LaTeX, others rather want names similar to the ones from the unicode database. I like to use directions for arrows like in the editor vi, others probably hate vi. Some might want to call the characters by their meaning, others by their visual appearance. However, this requires more detailed data about characters than is available in the unicode database. It is at the moment not possible for me to start a project that collects this data, but who knows what the future brings.
It is not trivial to use these input methods. Please look at the files (they are all text files) to learn how to use them and how the characters are called.
If you want to contribute, please send me your modifications.
SwissGermanMath.mim)This input method is specially crafted for the swiss german keyboard layout. This layout contains keys for ö, ä, ü. Hitting those keys while holding shift results in é, à, è respectively. Since these characters are nearly useless when you write german, one can use them to access mathematical characters instead. If you do not have a swiss german keyboard, this method is useless for you. However, since I use it all the time, it is the most mature.
é is used for accessing various mathematical characters and the
greek alphabet. à is used for arrows. Arrows have very short names
such as àdl for ⇒, àdd for ⇔, àsh
for ←. (Mostly, the second letter is the style of the arrow and the
third one the direction. For the direction, the vi-like h,j,k,l are
used.) è is used for accessing script, double-struck and fractur
letters and digits. The key with the diaeresis (the one with the !) is
used for accessing combining marks.
StateMath.mim)This input method has two states. One is for normal input, the other is for inputting mathematical signs. One can switch from one state to the other by hitting a special key.
FullMath.mim)This is as simplification of State Math. It has only one state which equals (more or less) the mathematical state of State Math. This is a better choice for you, if you can change the actual input method quickly with the keyboard. This also allows you to use the math input method together with another input method for normal text.
This input method can, since it uses no states, also be implemented using SCIM's table engine. Unfortunately, I have not done this up to now.
Entities.txt)If you like XML entities, then this input method may be of
interest. When you type in an entity, for example >,
then its value will be inserted, > in our example. The
entities have been taken from the w3c working draft
"XML
Entity definitions for Characters". Unfortunately, numeric
entities such as > are not available.
This method is not an m17n input method. It uses SCIM's table
module instead. In order to use it, you can simply install the file
Entities.txt as a table in the configuration dialog of
SCIM. (You do not need to care about entities.pl unless
you want to regenerate the table yourself.)
You need to have installed SCIM and it's table module
as described above. As far as I know, this table should also work
with iBus, but I have not
tested it.
There are some other methods I am considering. For example one for writing normal text and mathematics mixed without changing method or state. I still have to find out whether this is possible at all in a usable way.
For generating the entries for the mathematical alphabets (script, double-struck, fractur, etc.) I wrote a small perl script called MathAlphanum.pl which parses the NamesList.txt from the unicode database
I am working on a usage example with LaTeX. If you write LaTeX documents using a text editor, you perhaps want to use Unicode characters. Like this, you perhaps have a better overview, since the characters are schown directly and only the other commands are shown by name.