Tuesday, December 22, 2009 12:36 PM | rahel luethy | 2 comment(s)

wingdings, dingbats & circled digits

As much as I hate clip art, wingdings and the like, using circled digits to annotate screenshots is really handy, especially for bug reports.

because these characters don't really have a keyboard-key-equivalent, typing them is a pain. thus, as a note to myself, this is how to insert circled digits in gimp:

1. select the wingdings typeface ((zapf) dingbats or (open) symbol on mac/linux)
2. lookup the unicode of the symbol you'd like to insert
3. in gimp's text editor: press Ctrl-Shift-U (to enter unicode mode), enter the respective code (e.g. 2776 for the circled one), press Enter

as a programmer i'm quite puzzled by the fact that the mapping starts with the circled one (and zero doesn't seem to be available?), but probably i'm just missing something — apparently i still don't understand the concept behind unicode...

5:05 PM |  Cris Menéndez said...

In Word sollte auch das Alt-0139 für das schwarze Null, 0140 fürs "1" und so weiter... Ich habe noch nicht in ubuntu herausgefunden, wie ich "ñ", ¿ und ¡ einfacher als mit unicode einfügen kann v.v

5:25 PM |  rahel luethy said...

even simpler, copy/pasting via the charmap utility should work straight away in word. but you're correct, alt codes are easier to memorize than unicode (unfortunately, they're not supported by gimp).

you should be able to use the Ctrl-Shift-U sequence on ubuntu as well. ñ has unicode U+00F1, so you should be able to enter it as Ctrl-Shift-U 00F1 Enter. alternatively, you could use something like gucharmap -- good luck!