Lingua Character Inventory

Nota Bene's Lingua module includes an extensive set of characters including the extended Roman alphabet, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, the International Phonetic Alphabet and more. There are thousands of characters and hundreds of distinct diacritical marks. The Character Inventory dialog allows you to review the inventory of characters, select a character and/or compose a character or set of characters by combining different characters and/or accents. Once selected or composed, the character (or a set of characters) can be inserted into your document or it can be assigned to one of 376 positions on the keyboard (376 positions include 47 keys times 8 different combinations of unshifted, Shift, Ctrl and Alt). Once assigned, the character (or the combination of characters) can be entered by pressing Alt+F5 and then the key or key combination that you selected.

The Character Inventory dialog can be opened by clicking Insert, Characters from Inventory or by pressing Alt+Shift+F5. The same dialog is also available as the second tab on the Keyboard Dialog Bar and can be opened by pressing Alt+K and, if necessary, pressing Alt+K again. The first Alt+K opens the Keyboard Dialog Bar, and pressing Alt+K repeatedly cycles through the tabs on the Keyboard Dialog Bar. The two dialogs (Alt+Shift+F5 and Alt+K) are the same, except that the Alt+K dialog remains open on the right side of your screen as you work. This may be helpful if you are entering several characters from inventory. If you press Alt+Shift+F5 while the Keyboard Dialog Bar is open, the Character Inventory tab of the Keyboard Dialog Bar will open rather than the usual Alt+Shift+F5 dialog. For more information, see Keyboard Dialog Bar.

1	In the Character Groups window at the top left, click to highlight one of the groups (in the example above, Phonetic Letters & Symbols is highlighted).

2	Click one of the radio buttons in the Subgroups box. Each subgroup will display a different set of characters in the main window on the right side of the dialog.

3	The drop down box at the bottom of the Subgroups box can be used to select Regular, Superscript, Subscript, Small Caps, Rotated, 1st Element in Fraction or 2nd Element in Fraction. The characters displayed in the main window on the right side of the dialog will change in accord with your selection.

4	Click on the character you want to select (or type the letter in the small yellow box that is associated with the character you want to select). A light gray box will appear around the character you have selected and it will be reproduced in the box at the bottom right of the dialog.

1	Place your cursor at the point in the document where you want to insert the character.

3	Press the Insert button or double click on the character or press Alt+I.

Characters from the Character Inventory can be assigned to a key for future use, and complex characters can be composed and assigned to a key for future use. See User-Assigned Characters.

The Character Inventory for Hebrew vowels and cantillations mirrors the F6 pop-up screen for Hebrew and provides additional information including the names of the cantillations. See Character Inventory (Hebrew).