SWITCHING BETWEEN ALPHABETS
Star4Win has a sophisticated and highly flexible system of character input
and visualization. You can read more about it in the sections
on Keyboard Layout and
Encoding. Here we shall only deal
with the standard configuration, which allows input and output of standard
letters, standard linguistic (IPA) letters, Cyrillic letters, Church
Slavonic letters, Greek letters, Arabic letters, Chinese letters and
Japanese letters.
- The standard keyboard works as usual.
- Various alphabets are assigned to different keyboard
registers.
- Keyboard registers are chosen by pressing (simultaneously)
Alt + register number
(0-9). Currently there are
five active registers, of which the default is 0.
- Within each register, modifiers (None = left Shift,
right Shift, Alt and
Ctrl) can be used. Remember that those should be
pressed and released in order to switch the keyboard into a new state.
Simultaneously pressing a key and a modifier will lead to quite different
results: e.g., pressing Ctrl and then
i will produce the letter
; pressing Ctrl and
i simultaneously will switch the font input to
italic.
- The StarLing keyboard settings are contained in the
keyboard.dbf file. They are highly tunable: in fact,
it is easy to reprogram every single key by editing the contents of the above
database file. However, this is not recommended for the sake of compatibility
and format standards.
- For Chinese / Japanese input read the section on CJK
Alphabets.
NOTE: All keyboard settings are active both in text and graphic mode.
However, all alphabets besides the standard character set will be correctly
visualized only in graphic mode.