In Android, you can directly type all the characters you can see on your physical keyboard (assuming it's set up correctly): letters, digits, and all the common symbols.
You can probably also type some extras: for example, in some apps, Alt+E seems to be a dead key for an acute accent, so Alt+E followed by E enters é (just as on a Mac).
And you can also type many more characters using one of the pop-ups; in my UK layout, Fn+. pops up a list of emoji that you can tap on, and Fn+, pops up a list of symbols.
However, there are still many other symbols not covered by the above — including some I use a lot, such as long dashes, curly quotes, hard space, ellipsis, degree, and fractions.
How can you enter characters such as those?The only options I know about so far are:
- Copy and paste from somewhere, e.g. a file in an editor or browser: very slow and awkward.
- Install an app providing a special on-screen keyboard with those characters: very awkward, and limited to a particular selection.
- Install an app providing key shortcuts, and configure it for the characters you need: not sure if that's possible, and again necessarily limited to a small selection of chars.
Are there any better approaches?
(On the Psion 5 series, you could press Shift+Ctrl+Fn+C at any time to get a pop-up list of every character. Though that used CP1252 AKA Windows Latin-1, so there were only 128 chars not already covered. And you could also hold down Ctrl and type the decimal number of the character — less intuitive, but it did provide a way of entering any possible character. Does Android have any equivalent to either of these?)