On Macs I always appreciated the ease with which you could type special characters that don’t appear on the keyboard, like accented letters (á) or dashes (—). For example, for accented letters, you first hold down the Option key and press the appropriate key for the accent (` for a grave accent, e for acute accent, u for dieresis), and then press the letter you’d like under the accent — resulting in à, á, ä, etc.
On Windows I think it’s more complicated, but let’s say as little as possible about Windows.
On Linux, I’ve been assuming it would be similarly complicated, but it turns out to be only slightly less intuitive than Macs. Here’s what you need to do to get the typographical goodness flowing:
- Figure out what your compose key is — i.e. the key that performs the function of Option in the Mac example above. By default I believe it’s Shift+AltGr (i.e. the right Alt key), but if you want something simpler, go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options… > Compose key position. I use the Windows key as the compose key, since it doesn’t do much else on Linux.
- Learn the compose key combinations for the characters you often use. Em dashes (—) are
compose + ---(three hyphens); en dashes (–) arecompose + --.; acute accents arecompose + 'plus the vowel you’re after.
I’m not sure why double quotation marks are not on that list, but I’ll post an update if I figure them out.
PS — Speaking of proper typography, while I appreciate WordPress’s automatic conversion to proper, curly quotation marks, the algorithm could be improved. Quotes inside parentheses get bungled on the left side, as do quotes surrounded by hyphens. Examples from recent posts:
non-”Chopsticks”-type performers
(“Rock N’ Roll Cowboy Clothes since 1932″)
