Easily typing unicode letters to a HTML form

Solution 1:

Does Ctrl+Shift+U followed by hex code and Space work for you?

As demonstrated here, with Greek lambda, known from functional programming and lambda-calculus, hex code 03BB:

λ-calculus, see how I entered this below in a gif.

FWIW: it works for me on Ubuntu since 10.04, it worked on Linux Mint and on Debian (which serves as a base for both). I've tried this someday on Mac OS and it worked too (no idea which version it was). Never tried on Windows.

Solution 2:

Some options:

• If the stuff you put into the web form will be displayed as html, and if the form processing doesn't do any conversion/sanitizing, then you can type the html entities into your input text, e.g. Θ or ∝. It will look ugly in the form input, but displayed as html, it should look like Θ and ∝.

• You can install a Greek keyboard layout and set an accelerator key combo for switching between keyboards, e.g. Shift+Alt. This will only help for the Greek letters, obviously.

• You can learn the Alt+Num shortcuts for the symbols you want. The problem with this is that unfortunately, very few the characters on the page you linked have Alt+Num shortcuts.

None of these options will work for every character, so you will still have to resort to copying and pasting in some cases, but it's better than nothing.