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William Chia-Wei Cheng
(bill.cheng@acm.org)

Tgif FAQ - Accented & Math Characters

How do I produce accented characters?
In text input mode, tgif uses the <ESC> key to "turn bit 7 on". ASCII character codes range from 0 through 127. In an 8-bit character representation (where bit 0 is the least significant bit), ASCII characters are considered to have bit 7 turned off. You can see the character codes using xfd. Please try the following. Do "xlsfonts | grep helvetica" and pick a font. For example, you can pick:

    -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--14-100-100-100-p-76-iso8859-1
Then you can do:
    xfd -font "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--14-100-100-100-p-76-iso8859-1"
If you click on "a", you can see that it's character code is 0x61. If you divide the page displayed by xfd into 2 halves of 8 rows each and find the position corresponding to the "a" in the lower half of the page, you will find an "a" with a left-accent on top (sorry if the terminology is wrong). In tgif, in order to get a character in the bottom half, you enter an <ESC> character before the corresponding character in the top half of the map. Therefore, to get a left-accented "a", you can enter:

<ESC>a

in text mode. This also works with the Symbol font where you can get math symbols. For example, if you do:

    xfd -font "-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--12-*"
In order to get the ">=" symbol, you can enter:

<ESC>3