Keyboad-Layout and instructions for quicker (La)TeXing
With just a simple command it is possible to map any UTF-8 character in a LaTeX document to just about every LaTeX command, as if the character was the actual LaTeX command. While this is useful for allot of things, it is particularly nice with a custom keyboard layout.
Here is an example LaTeX source before character mapping:
f(x) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty \hat f(\xi)\ e^{2 \pi i \xi x}\,d\xi
And here the same source after:
f(x) = ∫_{-∞}^∞ \hat f(ξ) e^{2πi ξ x} dξ
Not only is the second code more readable, but it is faster and easier to type, if your keyboard layout looks like this:
For people that type a lot in LaTeX or have special Symbols of other languages that they use allot, this might be nice.
Simple put these lines before \begin{document} in your latex file:
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \input{/path/to/unicodedecl.tex}
Where you have to replace /path/to/unicodedecl.tex with the actual path to
the file of same name in this repository.
On Ubuntu, setting up the custom keyboard layout is as easy as running this script:
./installCustomLayout.sh
All it does is make a backup of the relevant layout file and then overwrite the
"English (Macintosh)" layout with the custom layout shown in the picture above.
Layouts are cached as binary files /var/lib/xkb/server-*.xkm. This means that
the script has to run dpkg-reconfigure xkb-data. On other systems/versions,
one might not have to run that command or delete the cache files and reboot
to take effect.
The only changes to the layout file are between lines 675 and 746 in ./installCustomLayout.sh`. They should be fairly self explanatory and the structure clear. Change the individual characters to what ever you use most.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[mathletters]{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
The vorticity $ω$ is defined as $ω = ∇ × u$.
\end{document}