A typography lover's dream comes true: we replenish the keyboard of a mobile phone (equipped with Android) with Russian quotation marks, a dash, paragraph and approximate equality symbols, letters of Imperial Speech

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I cannot stand bad typography, in which hyphens play the role of dashes, and “computer quotation marks” (“), more reminiscent of an inch or an angular second, are used instead of the “ Christmas tree ” quotation marks adopted in traditional Russian typography. I am also annoyed by the use of ordinary a space instead of an inextricable one, when a line break randomly breaks up a phrase, creating “hanging unions”, “hanging prepositions” and other forms of unsightly ugliness. I try to avoid this filth and complete my texts fully.

Under Windows and under A Mac can help a typography fan with Birman’s layout or other similar tools, and Linux users use a few more complex ones ([ 1], [ 2 ]), but still effective delights. And only under Android I did not succeed (until today) in achieving the desired. This was a real nightmare, especially when at the end of May 2011 an intestinal infection led me to a hospital bed in the detention center, where laptops were forbidden by the rules of the internal routine. For a whole week I had to wallow in an embrace with HTC Desire, bought last year, and it was painful to suffer from the need for a long time to do without typography at all, and even after recovering, not be able to fix it where the replicas cannot be fixed (comments on Habrahabr and in LiveJournal , microblogging on Twitter , answers toFormspring ...).

Then it still seemed to me that the impasse was hopeless, completely hopeless. The standard HTC Sense keyboard does not have an editable layout of non-standard characters, and its own set of them is far from desired. Many other keyboards available in the Android Market also do not contain inextricable space keys, do not contain decent, full-fledged quotes. And some of the fruits of South-East Asia’s laboreven sacrifice part of the Russian letters - for example, after reading one of the kedDroid reviews , you will find out that the Go Keyboard layout does not contain a solid sign and the letter “ё” (and only XHunter tells methat they are there, accessible by a long press - they are simply not drawn with the same clarity as the figures in the top row are shown): Oddly enough, the one who helped me find a way out of this deadlock turned out to be Asian. It was Jon Quach with a sprightly video review of the Smart Keyboard program:

[screenshot]





See how he praises the rich customization capabilities of Smart Keyboard PRO and the ability to use its free trial version of Smart Keyboard Trial without any particular inconvenience (except for a rarely pop-up window asking you to register)? And her skins are customizable, and her sounds are customizable, and multitouch is supported for simultaneous work with several fingers on the keyboard. Of course, I became interested, set myself a Smart Keyboard and immediately began to see if there was an item in her settings that allowed me to change the labels on her buttons.

There is no such item in the Smart Keyboard - and yet there is a tool that allows you to now enter any Unicode character into Android using the Smart Keyboard. Look at the screenshot of the Smart Keyboard available on the Android Market:

[Smart Keyboard screenshot]

I’ll say right away that the symbol “b” is entered by a long press on “b” (where it is drawn), and the symbol “ё” - by a long press on “e”.

But now take a closer look: what is the white bar above the top row of the keyboard? This is a hint line suggesting the results of autocompletion: “Russian”, “Russian” (the second part of the word “in Russian”, we must think), “Russian” - they are all taken from the dictionary, which for the Smart Keyboard must, by the way, be reinstalled separately ( And not only Russian, but English as well, and the author of the program should be praised for this: it is clear that if a keyboard is used by a resident of the rural East who does not need English at home, then precious memory is saved in the mobile phone).

And what happens when there is no way to tell a word, that is, when a word is already entered (for example, a space or a dot is inserted after it), or when a word has not been entered yet (for example, a mobile phone user typed the first letter of a word, but then changed his mind and pressed on Backspace)?

It turns out that on the Smart Keyboard (with itsdeservedly touted settings, this is not surprising!) there is the possibility to fill the auto-prompt in such cases with a set of pre-specified characters (always the same set, in the same order). This is like an additional, fifth from the bottom, a series of keys of a different color. By going to Settings →Language & keyboard → Smart Keyboard Trial → Text prediction ”(in the purchased version there will be“ PRO ”instead of“ Trial ”), it is easy to find the tick“ Suggest punctuation ”and the text field“ Custom punctuation ”that control the appearance and contents of this series of characters (by the name of the settings is easy to guess that these keys were intended to display punctuation). The “Custom punctuation” field is a text string, and any Unicode characters can be placed there, which will subsequently be (one at a time) available for input above the Smart Keyboard!

However, before that you can’t type them on the keyboard, so for a whileI have to think about where to get them. But this problem is not great in comparison with the path that has already been taken, and the answer is very simple: the computer with the installed Birman layout will become the character donor. It is enough to type on it and send a short text message to the microblog on Twitter :
Sinister tweet: "≈§ -" ѢѣІiѲѳѴѵ
After the colon, there are those characters that I wanted to mark above the keyboard. First come the more commonly used typography characters, including quotation marks and dashes (note that inside the quotation marks are not three, but four characters: an inextricable space is in front of the dash); they will all be visible immediately above the keyboard. Then come the symbols of the Imperial Speech (that element of the written speech of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Katkov, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Aksakov, Gumilyov, Bunin, Ilyin and other masters of the word, which was lost in the bloody nightmare of the Zhidobolshevitsky education); they, although not visible above the keyboard at first, can be accessed by scrolling through the list of prompts.

I had to copy the text inside Twitter “Custom punctuation” using the built-in browser (WebKit), although I have installed Firefox Mobile. Firstly, mobile Firefox has not yet been taught to copy plain text from pages; secondly, even if they taught, the non-mobile version of Firefox would surely reward their mobile child with a terrible hereditary ailment, which their entire family suffered from the time of Mozilla Suite and early Netscape - automatically converting inextricable spaces into normal ones during copying (to the clipboard an ordinary space appears even if it is the result of copying an inextricable one; it’s good that an inextricable space is not damaged in the original source).

The above microblogging is just a good example. Using my experience, you can fill the upper additional row of Smart Keyboard with a wide variety of symbols to your liking - for example, images of arrows, superscript and subscript numbers and fractions , currency symbols, Cyrillic elements of non-Russian peoples, and so on. Over time, I myself will feel the need for a single-character ellipsis, I foresee it in advance, but I must have hurried with the paragraph symbol - it is unlikely to be needed on the first, immediately visible, screen.

But these insignificant details will be the subject of further actions and will give rise, perhaps, additional comments and blog entries; my current story is over.

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