International Character Support

Photon is designed to handle international characters. Following the Unicode Standard (ISO/IEC 10646), applications built with Photon can easily support the world's major languages and scripts. Unicode is modeled on the ASCII character set, but uses 16-bit encoding to support full multilingual text.

This chapter includes:

Languages supported
Photon compose sequences

Languages supported

Photon has keyboard drivers that support these languages:

Danish
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Swedish

Photon has font sets that support these languages:

Afrikaans
Basque
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Finnish
Flemish
French
German
Greenlandic
Hawaiian
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Maltese
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Slovak
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Turkish
Welsh

There are tools available to help you make new keyboard drivers to support other languages. For more information, see the Keyboard tables section in the Unicode Multilingual Support chapter in the Photon Installation & Configuration guide.

Photon compose sequences

Photon comes equipped with standard compose sequences. If your keyboard doesn't include a character from the standard ASCII table, you can generate the character using a compose sequence. For example, ó can be generated by pressing the Alt key, followed by the ' key, followed by the o key.

These aren't keychords; press and release each key one after the other.

The following keys can be used for generating accented letters:

Key	Accent	Example sequence	Result
'	acute	Alt ' o	ó
,	cedilla	Alt , c	ç
^	circumflex	Alt ^ o	ô
>	circumflex	Alt > o	ô
"	diaeresis	Alt " o	ö
`	grave	Alt ` o	ò
/	slash	Alt / o	ø
~	tilde	Alt ~ n	ñ

If your keyboard doesn't have the following symbols, you can create them by pressing the Alt key, followed by the first key in the sequence, followed by the second key in the sequence.

Symbol	Description	Unicode value	Sequence
æ	small letter ae (ligature)	E6	Alt e a
Æ	capital letter ae (ligature)	C6	Alt E A
Ð	capital letter eth	D0	Alt D -
ð	small letter eth	F0	Alt d -
ß	small letter sharp s (German scharfes s)	DF	Alt s s
µ	micro sign	B5	Alt / U
			Alt / u
þ	small letter thorn	FE	Alt h t
Þ	capital letter thorn	DE	Alt H T
#	number sign	23	Alt + +
@	commercial at	40	Alt A A
©	copyright sign	A9	Alt C 0
			Alt C O
			Alt C o
			Alt c 0
			Alt c O
			Alt c o
®	registered trademark sign	AE	Alt R O
[	left square bracket	5B	Alt ( (
]	right square bracket	5D	Alt ) )
{	left curly bracket	7B	Alt ( -
}	right curly bracket	7D	Alt ) -
»	right-pointing double angle quotation mark	BB	Alt > >
«	left-pointing double angle quotation mark	AB	Alt < <
^	circumflex accent	5E	Alt > space
`'`	apostrophe	27	Alt ' space
`	grave accent	60	Alt ` space
\|	vertical bar	7C	Alt / ^
			Alt V L
			Alt v l
\	reverse solidus (backslash)	5C	Alt / /
			Alt / <
~	tilde	7E	Alt - space
	no-break space	A0	Alt space space
°	degree sign	B0	Alt 0 ^
¡	inverted exclamation mark	A1	Alt ! !
¿	inverted question mark	BF	Alt ? ?
¢	cent sign	A2	Alt C /
			Alt C \|
			Alt c /
			Alt c \|
#	pound sign	A3	Alt L -
			Alt L =
			Alt l -
			Alt l =
¤	currency sign	A4	Alt X 0
			Alt X O
			Alt X o
			Alt x 0
			Alt x O
			Alt x o
¥	yen sign	A5	Alt Y -
			Alt Y =
			Alt y -
			Alt y =
¦	broken (vertical) bar	A6	Alt ! ^
			Alt V B
			Alt v b
			Alt \| \|
§	section sign	A7	Alt S !
			Alt S 0
			Alt S O
			Alt s !
			Alt s 0
			Alt s o
`"`	diaeresis or umlaut	A8	Alt " "
·	middle dot	B7	Alt . .
			Alt . ^
`_,`	cedilla	B8	Alt , space
			Alt , ,
¬	not sign	AC	Alt - ,
	soft hyphen	AD	Alt - -
`^-`	macron	AF	Alt - ^
			Alt _ ^
			Alt _ _
+/-	plus-minus sign	B1	Alt + -
¹	superscript one	B9	Alt 1 ^
			Alt S 1
			Alt s 1
²	superscript two	B2	Alt 2 ^
			Alt S 2
			Alt s 2
³	superscript three	B3	Alt 3 ^
			Alt S 3
			Alt s 3
¶	pilcrow sign (paragraph sign)	B6	Alt P !
			Alt p !
ª	feminine ordinal indicator	AA	Alt A _
			Alt a _
º	masculine ordinal indicator	BA	Alt O _
			Alt o _
¹/₄	vulgar fraction one quarter	BC	Alt 1 4
¹/₂	vulgar fraction one half	BD	Alt 1 2
³/₄	vulgar fraction three quarters	BE	Alt 3 4
/	division sign	F7	Alt - :
*	multiplication sign	D7	Alt x x