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ITf Unicode DB

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• ITf Unicode DB
  • Teaser
  • Introduction to input methods
  • Demonstration video
  • My Economics notes as an example:

Teaser

• Have you ever written note summaries on Google Drive / Microsoft Word / OpenOffice? Have you ever been bothered by the inability to write Mathematical notation, without resorting to Equation Editor? e.g. ∫1/x dx = ln x? ∂Π/∂q?
• Have you ever discussed Mathematical and Scientific subjects on Facebook? Or Google Chat? And been bothered by the inability to type Greek letters (α, β, γ, δ, ...)?
• Are you a student or expat in the UK/Europe with a keyboard that does not support the € or the £?
• Writing about Psalm 119 and needing to reference ‭א‬, ‪ב‬, ‪ג‬?
• Discussing þingvellir in Iceland?

ITf Unicode DB is here to help! If you already type Chinese, Japanese or Korean on your PC, here's how it works in one sentence: Switch to the Unicode DB input method, Ctrl+Shift+U, apostrophe ('), and you are ready to go!

If you don't type Chinese, Japanese or Korean, read on...

Introduction to input methods

People who type Chinese, Japanese and Korean on computers are familiar with input methods because the typical keyboard is simply not large enough to contain all the characters used in these languages. Hence whenever we type we often have to search for the character to type.

For example, in Chinese, to type 'nǐhǎo' (你好 -- hello), we enter what it sounds like. The computer presents to us a list of phrases that sound similar to 'nihao'. We pick the phrase we want and the correct characters appear in our document.

In fact, if you own a smartphone, you know what input methods are -- instead of phonetic transcriptions, input methods for Western languages on smartphones convert error-prone touch or swipe patterns, or even voice recordings into possible words. If there are several possibilities, your smartphone might even offer you several possible candidates, as if you were typing Chinese, Japanese or Korean!

Likewise, ITf Unicode Db converts character descriptions and character codes into rarely-used but sometimes immensely useful characters. Most of the time, ITf Unicode Db functions lets you type as if you were just using a keyboard. But if whenever you need to use a special character, you can activate it using a special activation keystroke (the default is Ctrl+Shift+U) and type in the Unicode hexadecimal code, or search for it using the descriptions in the Unicode database.

Demonstration video

If you are interested to see how it might work, have a look at the demonstration video:

My Economics notes as an example:

I sneaked special characters into Google Drive:

▲ Note the dot above the P and the greek delta.