#1

Is there a hotkey in Writer for “Insert Special Character”?

And can the special characters window not close automatically when an insert is made?

Thank you.

#2

You can write your own macro(s) for this task, and then you can assign it/them to a/to some free (unused) hotkey.

#3

Use double click.

#4

Thanks for both suggestions.

I am correcting OCRed text in the Cyrillic alphabet, but I am not proficient in using the Windows Russian keyboard. An insertion can be one or more Cyrillic letters. If I understand LO macros correctly, I don’t think they would be suitable for this purpose.

I have been using BabelMap — similar to the Windows Character Map — however neither of these writes straight to a document but requires copy and paste. So I thought LO’s “Insert Special Character” (ISC), which does write straight to the document, might be less trouble.

The “double-click” advice is good, and solves the problem of inserting a sequence of characters. But when I have inserted one sequence, the focus does not return to the document without closing the ISC window. Then it has to be reopened for the next insertion.

For me, ideally, the ISC window should accumulate the chosen characters in a buffer (as CharMap does), and transfer the sequence to the document when “Insert” is clicked. “Insert” would move the focus back to the document, but leave the ISC window on screen, so that the focus can be returned to it for the next insertion.

It doesn’t seem that LO works like this, however.

#5

What is your procedure actually? From your description, I’d say, you’d better try the on-screen keyboard (look into accessibility options or whatever it is in the programs menu). Or learn to type in Russian.

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#6

Please tell us what operating system do you use. Thanks.>/s>

#7

He sort of tells, just pay a little attention:

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#8

@gabix ,
“Windows”, what 7, 8, 10,11?

#9

That’s a good point. However, I doubt that the version matters a lot in this particular case.

Generally, if you need frequent input of a certain set of characters, you should use the system input facilities rather than the character insert feature.

Just a side note: OOoFBTools is an excellent tool for processing recognized document. It even contains a couple of virtual keyboards (but not a Cyrillic one).

#10

Windows 10 :slight_smile:

The on-screen keyboard is a great answer, and will save me a lot of time.

cyrillic_chars
cyrillic_chars1920×1041 412 KB

If anyone’s interested, my method until now is shown in the above screenshot. The text is produced by OCR and contains many errors, especially at the right margin. The top line displayed lacks “че-” at the end, and I can click these in BabelMap, click “Cut”, and paste into LO.

Incidentally, I tried Word 2002 (and its Insert Symbol) on an old XP machine, and it works much better than LO, where the big problem is having to close the “insert” window to get back to your text and move to the next error. It’s an improvement that LO might think about.

Many thanks to all who commented.

#11

tdf#56301 ⁠

#12

Please, see here. :slightly_smiling_face:

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