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Inserting Special Characters

This function allows you to insert special characters, such as tick marks, boxes, and telephone symbols, into your text.

  • To view a repertoire of all characters, choose Insert - Special Character.
  • In the large selection field double-click on the desired character, which is inserted in the current document.
  • In any text input field (such as the input fields in the Find & Replace dialogue box) you can press Shift+Ctrl+S to open the Special Characters dialogue box.

At present there are three ways of entering letters with accents directly from the keyboard.

Solaris: Using a Sun keyboard. First press the Compose key to the right of the space bar, then enter the first and second modifiers.

Linux / NetBSD: Using the dead-keys. In an xterm window first press the (´) or (`) key. The character should not appear on the screen. Now press a letter, such as "e". The e is given an accent, é or è. If not, then check in the XF86Config file if a "nodeadkeys" XkbdVariant has been loaded there and replace it. You may also have set the environment variable SAL-NO-DEADKEYS, which deactivates the dead-keys.

All Unix systems: (Alt Graph) as additional compose key. The (Alt Graph) key can work in Office like the Compose key, if you set the environment variable SAL-ALTGR-COMPOSE. The (Alt Graph) key must trigger a mode-switch, so, for example, xmodmap -e "keysym Alt-R = Mode-switch" must be set. First press (Alt Graph), then the first modifier, then the second modifier. The characters are combined as described on a Solaris system in the file /usr/openwin/include/X11/Suncompose.h.