The typography fan's dream comes true: we fill up the keyboard of the mobile phone (equipped with Android) with Russian quotes, dashes, paragraph and approximate equality symbols, letters of Imperial Speech

I can't stand nasty typography, in which dashes play the role of dashes, and “computer quotes” ("), more reminiscent of the inch sign or angular second, are used instead of quotes," Christmas trees " adopted in traditional Russian typography. I also have a lot of annoying use of the usual space instead of inseparable, when the translation of a string by chance breaks the phrase, creating “hanging unions”, “hanging prepositions" and other forms of unsightly deformities. I strive to avoid this bad and to make out their texts fully.

Under Windows and Mac, a fan of typography helps Birman’s layout or other similar tools, and Linux users use somewhat more complex ([ 1 ], [ 2 ]), but still effective, refinements. And only under Android I could not manage (until now) to achieve 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 an isolation cell, where laptops were prohibited by internal regulations. The whole week I had to wallow in my arms with HTC Desire, bought last year, and suffer painfully from having to do typography for a long time, and even after recovery, we should not be able to fix it where the replicas cannot be corrected (comments on Habrahabr and LiveJournal , microblogging on Twitter , replies to Formspring ...).

Then it seemed to me that the deadlock is hopeless, absolutely hopeless. The standard keyboard HTC Sense 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 non-breakable spaces, do not contain decent, full quotes. And some of the fruits of labor in Southeast Asia even donate part of the Russian letters - for example, after reading one of the reviews of kedDroid , you learn that the Go Keyboard layout does not contain a hard sign and the letter “e” (and only XHunter tells me that they are there, accessible by a long press - they are simply not drawn with the same clarity with which the numbers in the upper row are depicted):
')


Strangely enough, the one who helped me find a way out of this impasse turned out to be Asian. It was Jon Quach with a spirited Smart Keyboard video review:



See how he praises the rich possibilities of setting up the Smart Keyboard PRO program and the ability to use its free trial version of the Smart Keyboard Trial without much inconvenience (except for the rare pop-up window asking you to register)? And the skins of it are tuned, and the sounds of it are tuned, 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 look to see if there is an item in its settings that allows you to change the inscriptions on its buttons.

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



At once I will say that the “” symbol is entered by long pressing on “” (where it is drawn), and the symbol “” by long pressing on “e”.

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

And what happens when there is no possibility to suggest a word, that is, when the word is already entered (for example, a space or a period is put after it), or when the word has not been entered yet (for example, the mobile phone user typed the first letter of a certain word, but then changed his mind and pressed on backspace)?

It turns out that on the Smart Keyboard keyboard (with its well- deservedly praised settings it is not surprising!) There is an opportunity to fill the auto-prompt in such cases with a set of pre-specified characters (always with the same set, in the same order). This is an additional, fifth lower row of keys of a different color. Going to “Settings → Language & keyboard → Smart Keyboard Trial → Text prediction” (in the purchased version 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 content of this series of characters (it is not difficult to guess from the name of the settings that these keys were intended to display punctuation). The “Custom punctuation” field is a text string, and any Unicode characters can be put there, which will then be (one at a time) available for input above the Smart Keyboard keyboard!

However, before that you can not type them on the keyboard, so for some time you have to think about where to get them. But this problem is not great in comparison with the path that has already been traversed, and the answer is quite simple: a computer with an installed Birman layout will become a symbol 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 in it are those characters that I wanted to mark over the keyboard. First, there are more common typography symbols, including quotes and dashes (note that there are not three, but four characters inside the quotes: there is an unbreakable space before the dash); all of them will be immediately visible above the keyboard. Then there are symbols of Imperial Speech (that element of the written speech of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Katkov, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Aksakov, Gumilev, Bunin, Ilyin and other masters of the word, which was lost in the bloody nightmare of the Bolshevik obrazzaniya); they can be accessed, though not visible above the keyboard, by scrolling through the list of prompts.

I had to copy text from Twitter into Custom punctuation via the built-in browser (WebKit), although I installed Firefox Mobile. First, Mobile Firefox has not yet taught copying plain text from pages; secondly, even if they taught, the immobile version of Firefox would certainly have rewarded their mobile child with a terrible hereditary ailment that their whole family had suffered since the days of Mozilla Suite and early Netscape - automatically converting non-breaking spaces into normal during copying (to the buffer exchange gets an ordinary space, even if it is the result of copying inseparable, it is good that the non-breaking space is not damaged in the original source).

The above microblogging is just a good example. Using my experience, you can fill the top additional row of the Smart Keyboard with a wide variety of symbols to your liking - for example, arrows, superscripts and subscripts, fractions , currency symbols, elements of the Cyrillic non-Russian peoples, and so on. In time, I myself will feel the need for a single-character ellipsis, I anticipate this beforehand, but I must have hurried with the paragraph symbol — it is unlikely to be needed on the first, immediately visible, screen.

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