Help:Special character insertion

In the FrathWiki page editing view there is a section beneath the main edit box called Special character insertion which looks something like this:

Special character insertion area contents

From top to bottom:

The character insertion scroll box

This scroll box contains several sections each consisting of Unicode characters from a certain script or category of characters:

IPA

Recognised IPA characters as listed on John Wells' site. The combining characters are shown with a ◌ which has to be deleted.

Latin

These are the characters of the Latin script as understood by Unicode. It probably differs from your idea of 'the Latin Alphabet' in terms of the size and nature of what it includes. Inter alia all IPA letters are contained in the Unicode Latin script.

Greek

The Greek alphabet plus punctuation and symbols peculiar to Greek. Also some symbols used in pre-classical Greek and in non-Greek languages which used to be written in the Greek alphabet.

Cyrillic

Cyrillic script for Slavic languages and several other languages of the former Soviet Union.

Diacritics

Common diacritics, shown in a larger font size so as to be easier to identify. The combining characters are shown with a ◌ which has to be deleted. Those most crucial to phonetic transcription are repeated in the IPA section.

Punctuation

Several punctuation characters not found on an ordinary keyboard.

Invisible characters

Some characters that are helpful for improving display but are not themselves shown as mark on the screen or paper. They are inserted as HTML entities so that one can locate them in the edit box.

To insert one of the listed characters in the main edit box all you need to do is to place the insertion point (the blinking wertical bar | ) where you want to insert the character, then click on that character in the scroll box, and the character will appear at the insertion point.

The script links

Links you can use to quickly get to the various sections in the scroll box. Unfortunately the browser will jump to the insert box, so you'll have to scroll the browser window to see the edit box again. However if you click on an insert character it will be inserted in the edit box and the browser will jump back up to that point in the edit box.

User specific insert characters

You can make your own user-specific set(s) of insert characters by creating a page http://wiki.frath.net/User:<your_username>/charinsert (you can create it easily by clicking this link) and populate the page with one or more HTML paragraphs on this pattern:

'''Language name''':<charinsert>Th e   s p e c i a l   ch a r s   &  
d i g r a ph s   o f   y o u r   c o n l a ng #1 </charinsert>

'''Most used IPA:''' <charinsert> æ ɑ ɒ ɔ ɕ ɖ ɘ ɛ ɞ ɡ ɣ ɦ ɧ ɭ ŋ ø ɵ ɷ ɻ ɽ ʁ ʂ ʈ ʋ ʐ ʑ </charinsert>

'''Conlang #2'''<charinsert> Ā ā Ă ă Ē ē Ī ī Ĭ ĭ Ō ō Ŏ ŏ Ū ū Ŭ ŭ Ǖ ǖ Ǟ ǟ </charinsert>

'''Conlang #3'''<charinsert> Ƃ ƃ Ƈ ƈ Ƌ ƌ Ƒ ƒ Ƙ ƙ Ơ ơ Ƥ ƥ Ƨ ƨ Ƭ ƭ Ư ư </charinsert>

'''Conlang #4'''<charinsert>  ء آ أ ؤ إ ئ ا ب پ ة ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع
 غ ف ڤ ق ك ڭ گ ڴ ل م ن ه و ى ي ـ </charinsert>

See User:Melroch/charinsert for an actual example!

You can now click on the "User specific insert characters" link in the Scripts section below the special character insertion box to reach your own insert character groups.

Tip: You can even provide easy access to your favorite templates this way, as long as you remember to replace any spaces in the template name with underscores _. You can put a + where you want your parameter text to go.

A word of warning

In MediaWiki you must always put a zero-width joiner character ‍ between a precomposed i with a superscript diacritic and a combining subscript diacritic, or the MediaWiki engine will 'normalize' it into a dotted i precomposed with a subscript diacritic and a combining superscript diacritic, which of course means that with most fonts you get the dot of the i disturbing the superscript diacritic! So you should write e.g. ī‍̨ — i.e. ī‍̨ — to get the right thing. Unfortunately you can't directly insert ‍ with Charinsert, so rather than writing <charinsert>ī&zwj;̨</charinsert> you must write <charinsert>ī&amp;zwj;̨</charinsert> or there will be no ZWJ at all, neither as an invisible character or as HTML. Life is hard sometimes! ☹ This is certainly an abuse of the ZWJ, but it works to get what we want, so let's have no qualms about it! ☺