FreeCompose: A Compose Key for Windows®.

What is it?

FreeCompose provides the functionality of a Compose key under Windows 2000 or above.

News

2014-August-12

Unplanned delays in getting 2.0 finished have caused me to accidentally sit on this for far too long, so I decided to mention this here in the meantime.

In May 2013, Sander van Geloven contacted me to bring to my attention his then–recently-published book, Compose Key Sequence Reference Guide 2012: for GNOME, Unity, KDE and X11. He asked if I could mention it in FreeCompose's documentation, and offered to send me a free copy. I looked it up online and agreed, and soon after a copy arrived in the mail.

This slim volume truly is the definitive guide to some 2800 of X11's 4000 Compose key sequences. In the first chapter, after a brief discussion of the limitations of the diverse array of traditional keyboard layouts and the cumbersome nature of some of the alternatives—e.g., the distraction and delay of websites or applications for finding characters, the difficulty of memorizing arbitrary code point values for direct input—the author introduces the Compose key and illustrates its operation with examples of the combinatorial, logical, and highly-mnemonic nature of most Compose key sequences.

The second chapter contains a detailed guide to Compose key sequences, grouped according to 20 Unicode character classes and ordered by Unicode code point. The third is composed of a four-page matrix of two-key sequences ordered by ASCII code point and their results, and the fourth, an index of compose sequences starting with each printable ASCII character.

The book is available from CreateSpace and Amazon.com .ca .cn .de .es .fr .in .it .jp .uk for under $11 CN¥75 €7 ₹600 JP¥1000 £5, so whether you need the occasional exotic character or perform multilingual word processing, this book makes a worthwhile addition to the reference shelf.

Compose Key Sequence Reference Guide 2012: for GNOME, Unity, KDE and X11 by Sander van Geloven. ISBN-13 978-1-4681-4110-8, ISBN-10 1-4681-4110-4. 76 pp., in English. Hellebaard. Perfect bound.

2013-March-30

No, really. Look at the Subversion repository. It's been far too long, but things really are moving again!

2012-July-25

FreeCompose is not dead!

2011-March-19

FreeCompose 1.1.0.5 alpha posted in the Downloads section. See the downloads' descriptions (x86 or x64) for the list of changes.

2011-March-10

FreeCompose 1.1.0.4 alpha was released.