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This topic has been addressed on quite a few web pages of this website, however I do not yet understand the full extent of the things that we might be able to do with the Compose key. A user here has explained in How to type unicode characters in KDE? that, for example, we can do the following:

* Compose, v, C → Č
* Compose, ´, E → É
* Compose, _, u → ū
* Compose, ^, i → î
* Compose, ,, S → Ş
* Compose, +, o → ơ
* Compose, ;, a → ą
* Compose, U, g → ğ
* Compose, ", u → ü
* Compose, °, A → Å
* Compose, ~, N → Ñ
* Compose, +, - → ±
* Compose, ., > → ›
* Compose, ., . → …
* Compose, ., = → •
* Compose, P, ! → ¶
* Compose, !, ^ → ¦
* Compose, !, ! → ¡
* Compose, ?, ? → ¿
* Compose, s, s → ß
* Compose, o, e → œ
* Compose, O, E → Œ
* Compose, a, e → æ
* Compose, A, E → Æ

My impression from the above example is that we can combine two keys to produce the characters. Now, my questions are as follows:

  1. Is it possible to combine multiple keys (for example, four keys) to achieve typing a greater range of Unicode characters?

  2. Is it possible to define the key combinations arbitrarily? For example, if you press Ctrl+I+N+T to make an integral sign appear?

  3. What about exotic characters? For example, the character ɔ is Unicode, but if we place a tilde sign over it, it’s not Unicode. So, can we define key sequences for these non-Unicode characters as well?

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1 Answer

SHIFT-CONTROL-U-hexidecimal-space will give you Unicode symbols. I used this on Windows years back and it still works for me on Linux using XFCE4. I think I remember this working on KDE as well.

For Unicode tables, I generally use Unicode Charts as a resource.

In KDE if I remember correctly, as it has been a while, I was forced to use the numeric keypad. The top row numbers would not work for it.

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