Hi guys,

I'd love to be able to type short mathematical formulas in emails without having to write a full LaTeX document.

I've found this unicode block which is just what I was looking for.

How can I type these characters? I'm not familiar with the KDE keyboard layout stuff. Is there something like a button for the systray which I could just click and then get an offer for the characters I want to type?

TIA,
Blackhole

I find the easiest way to get Unicode characters that other programs do not support is to open an empty KWord document and then Insert>Special character; make sure the font is the same as the one in the other program and then Insert the characters. If I need spaces between the characters, I ignore them and put in the whole sequence without spaces. Then I Close, add the spaces and Copy and Paste the resulting string into the other document.

So far I have not had a problem with any program as long as the characters are supported by the font.

I keep a list of the 'pages' in the KWord dialogue so that I can go straight to the relevant 'page' for the characters I want rather than having to search for them each time.

Thanks for the tipp John. However I wonder whether there is something like a virtual keyboard where I could just click on keys or something...

Not exactly a virtual keyboard, but you could type the formula in KCharSelect, which is probably better than copy-pasting from a webpage...

You have to bear in mind that there may be a thousand or more characters in a font which extends through the Unicode sequence; there just isn't space or enough key combinations to create a single interface. I think the KOffice approach of offering all the pages is the nearest you will get because you simply could not go through the sequence and decide where to put a particular character on a virtual keyboard. Even within Western Europe the same Unicode characters appear on different keys in different countries. So working out a satisfactory arrangement for a virtual keyboard would be a nightmare.

Indeed, the LyX team which have been trying to wrestle with this to handle the huge number of maths characters in LaTeX have made several different attempts over the years. I think the current arrangement is the best they have devised but it took ten years to get to this stage.

Thank you so much guys, especially to Alec. KCharSelect is exactly what I was looking for. I didn't know that little program. Excellent!