Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

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mjfriedman
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Joined: 2007-11-20 06:22:05

Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by mjfriedman »

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere. Is it possible to assign a keystroke to insert a particular symbol/special character? System preferences allows for substitutions, i.e. "s =" changes to my desired ≈ but this doesn't work in NW.

Thanks! Michael
adryan
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Location: Australia

Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by adryan »

G’day, Michael et al

First make sure your special character appears somewhere in NWP’s Special Characters Palette:–

Insert > Special Character > Customize Special Characters…

Next, Nisus Writer Pro > Preferences > Menu Keys > Insert > Special Character > etc (until you arrive at the desired character)

Then Set the keyboard shortcut you wish to use.

An alternative approach would be to use a Glossary.

Cheers,
Adrian
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)
macOS Ventura
Nisus Writer user since 1996
mjfriedman
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Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by mjfriedman »

Thank you!
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martin
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Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by martin »

Adrian's advice is definitely a great way to achieve your goal. For completeness I'd like to point out a few other ways:

1. Use Nisus glossaries, which can expand not only plain text, but also formatted text and other content.
2. Edit your list of QuickFix typos to insert the desired character(s). QuickFix entries are configured per-language.
3. Checkmark the option "Expand Mac system-wide text replacements as you type" in Nisus Writer's QuickFix preferences. That will expand your text replacements as established in your macOS system preferences.
Vanceone
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Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by Vanceone »

While you've mentioned QuickFix's Martin, can I ask about a feature from Word I miss? THat's an automatic fix for two capitals at the beginning of a word or sentence; I've accidentally typed one in this sentence and left it as a demonstration.

Right now I'm not sure I see how an automatic fix could be applied. Perhaps an idea could be to allow a Powerfind expression (really a Regex) as a quickfix with a replacement to be applied... if a user could write one and have it always running in the background for whatever they personally need?

Of course some guards against excessively complex find or find and replace would have to be employed.
adryan
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Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by adryan »

G’day, Vanceone et al

On the subject of inadvertent capitalization of the second letter in a word or sentence, I think the simplest solution is to select the offending word(s) and convert To Capitalized (ie, Edit > Transform Text > To Capitalized).

I can’t remember whether the following keyboard shortcuts come with NWP as default or whether I assigned them, but I’ve used them for years because they are so handy:–

⌘⌥L To lowercase
⌘⌥U To UPPERCASE
⌘⌥C To Capitalized

(As an aside, it would be nice if the “⌘” and “⌥” symbols were included in the Special Characters Palette by default, to save us having to add them ourselves.)

Of course, other solutions are possible (such as Find/Replace, macros, QuickFix, Glossary, disabling the Shift and Caps Lock keys :) ), but inevitably there will arise some special case that needs to be dealt with separately (eg, “XY-plane”).

All things considered, the above method is the one I recommend. It’s easily remembered, easily implemented, quick, works on as many words as you wish, and can be used immediately or later on. And you can choose whether or not to apply it in any given situation.

Cheers,
Adrian
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)
macOS Ventura
Nisus Writer user since 1996
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martin
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Re: Keyboard Shortcut for Special Characters?

Post by martin »

Vanceone wrote: 2019-01-04 22:40:30 While you've mentioned QuickFix's Martin, can I ask about a feature from Word I miss? THat's an automatic fix for two capitals at the beginning of a word or sentence
I'll see about adding or upvoting that feature in our issue tracker. Thanks for the suggestion!

In the meantime a PowerFind / regex expression to fix that kind of typo document-wide isn't too tricky. You'd want to find two capitals at the start of any word that isn't otherwise entirely capitalized and replace it with a transformed version of itself. Here's the PowerFind version:
powerfind.png
powerfind.png (79.27 KiB) Viewed 9944 times

Turning off the "Ignore Case" option here is critical and easy to forget. I'll attach a macro-ized version that's makes this simpler to run.
Attachments
Double Uppercase Fixer.nwm.zip
(2.24 KiB) Downloaded 501 times
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