Inputting Greek letter in textarea

[dungping]

Is it possible to directly enter Greek letters, such as Δ and
γ in the textarea. The entering is on the English keyboard, that
is, when pressing a key on the English keyboard, a Greek letter would
appear in the textarea.

Please teach. Thanks.

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [dungping] on Tuesday 30 August 2005 02:06 \__

Is it possible to directly enter Greek letters, such as Δ and
γ in the textarea. The entering is on the English keyboard, that
is, when pressing a key on the English keyboard, a Greek letter would
appear in the textarea.

Please teach. Thanks.

See the recent thread below. It is very similar 'anatomically'.

http://message-id.net/[email protected]

Hope it helps,

Roy

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Is it possible to directly enter Greek letters, such as Δ and
γ in the textarea.

"Δ" and "γ" are entity references, and it is not clear whether
you mean the references or the characters denoted by them. Apparently the
characters, so it would be better to say just "such as delta and gamma" (or
omit these words, since anyone who does not know what Greek letters are
will probably fail to understand the question anyway).

The answer is that it depends.

The entering is on the English keyboard, that
is, when pressing a key on the English keyboard,
a Greek letter would appear in the textarea.

This depends on what you mean by "English keyboard". A physical keyboard
can be configured in many ways, and switching between different keyboard
layouts is easy as soon as you've learned how it works. The difficult part
is to memorize the assignments or to use a cheat sheet to check them.

Naturally, this also depends on the underlying system, available fonts,
etc. And what happens to the Greek letters when the form is submitted is
yet another story.

As so often, the crucial question is "why do you ask?" Are you asking about
browser usage, or about authoring? In the latter case, what is really the
problem you are trying to solve?

 

[Els]

A physical keyboard
can be configured in many ways, and switching between different keyboard
layouts is easy as soon as you've learned how it works.

Could it be it's so easy I do it by accident? Regularly I find myself
typing in a program, and all of a sudden I have a Spanish keyboard
instead of American. The only way I know to get rid of it, is close
and restart the program. It never happens for the more than one prog
at a time - it's like I'm typing in MSN and it switches to Spanish
keyboard, but TextPad is still behaving nicely. Or vice versa. Even
happens in browsers. Means I can't type a URL anymore, cause the '/'
has changed position. I'd love to know what I did to make it happen,
so I can reverse it without closing the program.

 

[rf]

Could it be it's so easy I do it by accident? Regularly I find myself
typing in a program, and all of a sudden I have a Spanish keyboard
instead of American. The only way I know to get rid of it, is close
and restart the program. It never happens for the more than one prog
at a time - it's like I'm typing in MSN and it switches to Spanish
keyboard, but TextPad is still behaving nicely. Or vice versa. Even
happens in browsers. Means I can't type a URL anymore, cause the '/'
has changed position. I'd love to know what I did to make it happen,
so I can reverse it without closing the program.

You have the Spanish input language installed (along I presume with English
and Dutch). The input language is the service that maps the keyboard to the
requirements of the particular language.

In addition you have a hotkey set to activate Spanish. I don't know what the
default is but in my system I have a few languages installed and, for
example, Left Alt + Shift is the one to switch between languages. You mignt
have something odd like Ctrl + Shift + s to change to Spanish and you
sometimes accidently press Shift as well when you mean Ctrl + s to save.

The "current language" is not system wide, it is specified on a per window
basis. This is why it seems to you that it only happens with one program at
a time. One window is set to Spanish, the rest are set to [English | Dutch].

Find the language bar thingo just to the left of the system tray, probably
displays EN if you are in English. Right click properties and then Key
Settings.

Cheers
Richard.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Is it possible to directly enter Greek letters, [in textarea]

Depends on your OS and installation options whether you have input
methods for these letters, but with modern OSes it's usually feasible.

Perhaps if you'd be more explicit about your OS, you may get more specific
advice as to how to enable these options as necessary.

Copy/pasting the character from some kind of character-picker display
is an alternative approach if you haven't got an input method for it.

If it's meant to do what you ask for, then the page in question will need
to be in a character encoding which includes these characters. utf-8 is
usually a good choice nowadays (except NN4.* versions are broken).

such as Δ and γ in the textarea.

Please ask your question more precisely. Entering the characters
ampersand D e l t a semicolon is easy. I assumed you wanted to enter
the character itself, not some ampersand-notation representation of it.

good luck

 

[Els]

Could it be it's so easy I do it by accident? Regularly I find myself
typing in a program, and all of a sudden I have a Spanish keyboard
instead of American. The only way I know to get rid of it, is close
and restart the program. It never happens for the more than one prog
at a time - it's like I'm typing in MSN and it switches to Spanish
keyboard, but TextPad is still behaving nicely. Or vice versa. Even
happens in browsers. Means I can't type a URL anymore, cause the '/'
has changed position. I'd love to know what I did to make it happen,
so I can reverse it without closing the program.

You have the Spanish input language installed (along I presume with English
and Dutch). The input language is the service that maps the keyboard to the
requirements of the particular language.

In addition you have a hotkey set to activate Spanish. I don't know what the
default is but in my system I have a few languages installed and, for
example, Left Alt + Shift is the one to switch between languages. You mignt
have something odd like Ctrl + Shift + s to change to Spanish and you
sometimes accidently press Shift as well when you mean Ctrl + s to save.

The "current language" is not system wide, it is specified on a per window
basis. This is why it seems to you that it only happens with one program at
a time. One window is set to Spanish, the rest are set to [English | Dutch].

Okay, sounds all like it's very easy to solve indeed, just have to
find the hotkeys used on this PC.

Find the language bar thingo just to the left of the system tray, probably
displays EN if you are in English. Right click properties and then Key
Settings.

I had to dig it up again (taken it off from there for the sake of
space), and although I tick the language bar, it doesn't appear. I
also can't find the language/keyboard from the configuration window (I
keep forgetting what it's called in English)

I will find it back eventually though

Thanks for the info

 

[Els]

In addition you have a hotkey set to activate Spanish.

[...]
I also can't find the language/keyboard from the configuration
window (I keep forgetting what it's called in English)

Found it - removed hotkey - problem solved. Thanks again

 

[rf]

Found it - removed hotkey - problem solved. Thanks again

Glad to be of service M'Lady

What *was* the hotkey (for future reference)?

Cheers
Richard.

 

[Els]

Glad to be of service M'Lady

What *was* the hotkey (for future reference)?

I can't be sure - I just saw something with the word 'shift' in it and
deleted it, but looking at the options, it was probably alt-shift to
change the language, and ctrl-shift to change the keyboard.

This also explains why I have experienced two different Spanish
settings - there were 4 different keyboard settings in the list, of
which one Dutch language - Spanish keyboard, and one Spanish (Mexico)
language - Latin-American keyboard.
My regular setting is Dutch language - USA keyboard.

 

[rf]

rf wrote:

[language input]

I can't be sure - I just saw something with the word 'shift' in it and
deleted it, but looking at the options, it was probably alt-shift to
change the language, and ctrl-shift to change the keyboard.

Hmmm. I guess we'll never know then. Ctrl + Shift *is* a nasty combination
though. I can see how you might often activate that by mistake, slip of the
little finger.

Nasty things these hot keys. I usually (if I use them) choose something that
must be activated with two hands, like left-Alt + right-shift. You *can't*
hit that one by mistake, a bit like Ctrl Alt Del

Of course though the keyboard language hotkeys don't allow such things :-(

<aside>
Was writing/constructing/debugging some new software/firmware/hardware the
other day, on the notebook. Required me to press Ctrl Mouse left button
(that takes care of one hand) and then press a certain button on my hardware
device (two hands used up) and *at the same time* press the insert key. What
to do. The only solution was to ask the good wife to pause her trains and
press the offending key for me. Red faces etc. Hot key combination now fixed
Wife back at her railway empire

This also explains why I have experienced two different Spanish
settings - there were 4 different keyboard settings in the list, of
which one Dutch language - Spanish keyboard, and one Spanish (Mexico)
language - Latin-American keyboard.
My regular setting is Dutch language - USA keyboard.

So what is this fixtion with Spanish, expecially the one so bloody close to
the U S of A?

Cheers
Richard.

 

[Els]

rf wrote:

[language input]

I can't be sure - I just saw something with the word 'shift' in it and
deleted it, but looking at the options, it was probably alt-shift to
change the language, and ctrl-shift to change the keyboard.

Hmmm. I guess we'll never know then. Ctrl + Shift *is* a nasty combination
though. I can see how you might often activate that by mistake, slip of the
little finger.

Worse. Ctrl-shift-Z is how I get text back after having used Ctrl-Z
right here in this window I'm typing in now, and Ctrl-shift-R is how I
start recording a macro in TextPad.

Nasty things these hot keys. I usually (if I use them) choose something that
must be activated with two hands, like left-Alt + right-shift. You *can't*
hit that one by mistake, a bit like Ctrl Alt Del
Yup.

Of course though the keyboard language hotkeys don't allow such things :-(

The ones to get straight to a particular setting do. For those you
have to use either alt or ctrl, combined with shift, and a digit.

<aside>
Was writing/constructing/debugging some new software/firmware/hardware the
other day, on the notebook. Required me to press Ctrl Mouse left button
(that takes care of one hand) and then press a certain button on my hardware
device (two hands used up) and *at the same time* press the insert key. What
to do. The only solution was to ask the good wife to pause her trains and
press the offending key for me. Red faces etc. Hot key combination now fixed
Wife back at her railway empire
</aside>
LOL!


So what is this fixtion with Spanish, expecially the one so bloody close to
the U S of A?

That's from about a year and a half ago, when I wanted to see for
myself what a Mexican keyboard looked like, to understand why John [1]
was so slow on the smileys in MSN

 

[rf]

rf wrote:

So what is this fixtion with Spanish, expecially the one so bloody close to
the U S of A?

That's from about a year and a half ago, when I wanted to see for
myself what a Mexican keyboard looked like, to understand why John [1]
was so slow on the smileys in MSN

He should have assigned a... hotkey to the smiley

Cheers
Richard.

 

[Els]

rf wrote:

So what is this fixtion with Spanish, expecially the one so bloody
close to the U S of A?

That's from about a year and a half ago, when I wanted to see for
myself what a Mexican keyboard looked like, to understand why John [1]
was so slow on the smileys in MSN

He should have assigned a... hotkey to the smiley

Might have worked in MSN, but try writing a Perl program with the ! $
; * + - = ~ ( ) { } " and ' all in the 'wrong' place

 

[rf]

Els wrote:

[installed languages]

Do you mean to tell me that you have not re-installed your windows system
for eighteen months?

Dear girl, you should plan to do it every 3 months or so. I do, I often have
to.

1) Clears out all the stuff one is tempted to download and install on a
whim, those things that simply clutter up the registry and the disk.

2) Makes real sure your backups and so on are up to scratch. If you cannot
re-install everything, and I mean *everything*, up till a half an hour ago
during a scheduled refresh then you are stuffed when suddenly your hard disk
dies. This happens to me about once a year or so[1]. Where is the backup of
that fine web site you maintain?

I suppose I am a little different to you though. I have seen your computer.
You have seen my computer room. The other day I installed an additional
160[2] gig disk in one of the spare computers to be used exclusively as a
backup disk for the other six computers. And yes, I have backups way back to
the early 1980's. The original source code of programs that are now
obsolete. However, oddly, some of my customers still use that software

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

[2] Less that AU$1 per gig. Cheap as disposables these days. It's cheaper
for me to add a new backup disk than it is to spend the time to delete the
rubbish

<aside>
Bill Gates notices a $50 note in the gutter as he promenades down the
sidewalk. Does he pick it up?

No. It would cost him more to stop/stoop/snatch than to continue on the the
meeting he is due to attend.
</aside>

Cheers
Richard.

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [rf] on Tuesday 30 August 2005 12:41 \__

Els wrote:

[installed languages]

Do you mean to tell me that you have not re-installed your windows system
for eighteen months?

Dear girl, you should plan to do it every 3 months or so. I do, I often
have to.

1) Clears out all the stuff one is tempted to download and install on a
whim, those things that simply clutter up the registry and the disk.

2) Makes real sure your backups and so on are up to scratch. If you cannot
re-install everything, and I mean *everything*, up till a half an hour ago
during a scheduled refresh then you are stuffed when suddenly your hard
disk dies. This happens to me about once a year or so[1]. Where is the
backup of that fine web site you maintain?

I suppose I am a little different to you though. I have seen your
computer. You have seen my computer room. The other day I installed an
additional 160[2] gig disk in one of the spare computers to be used
exclusively as a backup disk for the other six computers. And yes, I have
backups way back to the early 1980's. The original source code of programs
that are now obsolete. However, oddly, some of my customers still use that
software

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a
[week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

[2] Less that AU$1 per gig. Cheap as disposables these days. It's cheaper
for me to add a new backup disk than it is to spend the time to delete the
rubbish

Richard,

Truly... is it not enough to convince that Windows is a Toy O/S? I have run
SuSE for 2 years and it is still as fast as it was in day one... and it has
about 3 GB of software installed.

Speaking of which, Vista will be worse in terms of hardware requirements
[1]... much worse, so brace yourself (or spend more money on a new machine
with new software licences).


[1]
http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=411&Itemid=26

"...If this was not enough to turn people off from Vista, there are the
hardware requirements..."

<aside>
Bill Gates notices a $50 note in the gutter as he promenades down the
sidewalk. Does he pick it up?

No. It would cost him more to stop/stoop/snatch than to continue on the
the meeting he is due to attend.
</aside>

Stop. *friendly smile* That's from Brad Templeton (at least a variant of
it). He hates it when people copy that.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html

"Copyright 1997-9 Brad Templeton. Second photo courtesy Philip Greenspun.
Please don't copy this article, but feel free to link to it on the web."

Roy

 

[Dylan Parry]

Using a pointed stick and pebbles, rf scraped:

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

We had a machine die on us in the office last week. Caused a major
headache as the latest backups hadn't been scheduled until the *day
after* the machine died. Needless to say, I have implemented a more
/paranoid/ approach to backups now!

I went and got a a new 250GB USB hard disk, which is now hooked up to
the file server. I then fitted an extra hard disk to each machine in the
office, with the understanding that *all* documents are saved on those
disks and those disks alone - no saving to the C drive etc. Each machine
in the office then performs an incremental backup of those disks each
night, which is then copied across the network to the server *and* to
the USB hard disk attached to it. As a bit of extra paranoia, I will be
making DVD copies of the most important stuff each week

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [Dylan Parry] on Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:04 \__

Using a pointed stick and pebbles, rf scraped:

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a
[week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

We had a machine die on us in the office last week. Caused a major
headache as the latest backups hadn't been scheduled until the *day
after* the machine died. Needless to say, I have implemented a more
/paranoid/ approach to backups now!

I know what you mean.

http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/08/23/data-loss/

You might wish to have a look at the links at the bottom.

I went and got a a new 250GB USB hard disk, which is now hooked up to
the file server. I then fitted an extra hard disk to each machine in the
office, with the understanding that *all* documents are saved on those
disks and those disks alone - no saving to the C drive etc. Each machine
in the office then performs an incremental backup of those disks each
night, which is then copied across the network to the server *and* to
the USB hard disk attached to it. As a bit of extra paranoia, I will be
making DVD copies of the most important stuff each week

What if the place went on fire? You must also back up your data remotely.
Always. Geographically distant place, that is.

Roy

 

[Els]

[installed languages]

Do you mean to tell me that you have not re-installed your windows system
for eighteen months?

Longer than that. May 2003 I built the PC, installed XP Home on it,
and indeed, haven't done a re-install since.

Dear girl, you should plan to do it every 3 months or so. I do, I often have
to.

I used to do that when I was using Win95 on 408MB HD. Today, there
seems no need

1) Clears out all the stuff one is tempted to download and install on a
whim, those things that simply clutter up the registry and the disk.

But I /use/ those things...
I have a fairly good memory, and the other day someone asked about a
prog to make X-faces. If I'd done a re-install, I'd not have that prog
anymore, as I don't use it ever. But I'm still glad it's right here in
my shortcut collection in my Sidebar, just in case
I've progs here that used to be freeware, and aren't available online
as such anymore. The more precious of those I've backed up on
floppies. But why would I wanna mess with those every three months?

2) Makes real sure your backups and so on are up to scratch.

I only back up what's really important to me. Which is my digital
photos, and sometimes mail.

If you cannot
re-install everything, and I mean *everything*, up till a half an hour ago
during a scheduled refresh

I wouldn't even know how!

then you are stuffed when suddenly your hard disk dies.

If that would happen, I'd see which one of the two was the dead one,
and if it would be the one with the C:/ on it, I'd go install XP
again, and slowly build up the collection of all those little handy
progs again.

This happens to me about once a year or so[1]. Where is the backup of
that fine web site you maintain?

I'd say online ;-)
I have it locally, and remotely. Of course I could make a third backup
in case both the host's HD and mine die at the same time. And once in
a while I zip it up and burn it on a disk.

I suppose I am a little different to you though. I have seen your computer.
You have seen my computer room. The other day I installed an additional
160[2] gig disk in one of the spare computers to be used exclusively as a
backup disk for the other six computers. And yes, I have backups way back to
the early 1980's. The original source code of programs that are now
obsolete. However, oddly, some of my customers still use that software

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

It wouldn't be a week downtime for me - it would only take me as much
time as I need to go to the shop around the corner and find my
screwdriver, and then adding the time it takes to install XP and
Apache, download some sites... One day total?

[2] Less that AU$1 per gig. Cheap as disposables these days. It's cheaper
for me to add a new backup disk than it is to spend the time to delete the
rubbish

Indeed.
<quote from my site>
Throwing out stuff occasionally would help of course, I might do that
later in life. Or I'll just wait till the whole lot crashes some time,
saves me the work of sorting out what I want to keep and what not ;-)

<aside>
Bill Gates notices a $50 note in the gutter as he promenades down the
sidewalk. Does he pick it up?

No. It would cost him more to stop/stoop/snatch than to continue on the the
meeting he is due to attend.
</aside>

I wouldn't mind having his income

 

[rf]

Dylan Parry

Using a pointed stick and pebbles, rf scraped:

[1] The first time I lost a disk (many years ago) it caused me about a week
downtime. I work for myself so I cannot cost this but I guess several
thousands of dollars.

We had a machine die on us in the office last week. Caused a major
headache as the latest backups hadn't been scheduled until the *day
after* the machine died.

<snip backup strategy>

I should have known better with my [1] example. I was just starting out on
my own, late 1980's. I had just retired from a Real Job working with
mainframes. I was actually the manager in charge of (amongst other things)
orchestrating the backups, full backup to tape of every 300 MB disk every
night and taken away by the secure backup company who held them for us in a
secret location.

Retires...

PCs. Backup? Why?

Soon learned.

Today, much like yours.

Each [main] computers mirrored to all the others overnight.
All computers backed up to two dedicated backup disks on demand.
All source instantly mirrored to backup [by a purpose built program] as it
is saved, from whatever editor is used.
All source code backed up weekly to CD.
I *think* I am safe. Havn't been caught out recently.

The last disk crash was about two months ago. Took me three hours to bring
it all back up. Takes that long to format and reconfigure a blank 80 gig
disk.

Cheers
Richard.