[Scribus] Absolute newbie: typographical symbols

[Daniel Andor]

On Thursday 02 September 2004 11:00 am, scribus-request at nashi.altmuehlnet.de 
wrote:
> (1) how to insert common ``typographical" symbols into
> plain text files, e.g. endash, emdash, typograthic
> apostrophes and quotation marks, bullets (ugh) and the
> like.

I've discovered that on my UK (gb) keyboard mapping, things like AltGr-v and 
AltGr-b  (along with Shift-AltGr-v and Shift-AltGr-b) are mapped to useful 
things like quotation and apostrophe marks: ?? `' ?? (This may not come 
through, unless utf8 is allowed.)

There's always F12 if you know the 4-digit Unicode code of your character.  I 
find 
	http://moonjihad.lns.kicks-ass.net/unicoderef.html
useful.

> (2) given where I live in Canada, the newsletter has
> to ?contain a mixture of English- and French-language
> content. My French text displays fine in kvim but not
> with cat or less at the command line.

I find that if you remember to save your text in UTF8 and then remember to 
import your text as UTF8, then a lot of the special characters survive (even 
the typographical symbols).

I also find the perl "umap" utility useful for converting between arbitrary 
encodings.  (debian package libunicode-map8-perl)
	http://www.zevils.com/cgi-bin/man/man2html?umap+1

Daniel.