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Introducing Charpal, a plugin for WordPress 2.5 by David Romano, the long-awaited successor to David’s IPA Symbol Plugin (first noted here a couple of years ago).
With Charpal installed and activated as a WordPress 2.5 plugin, users of your blog (authors as well as commenters) can easily enter characters from various character sets. With the cursor in a text entry field, users just need to press a shortcut key (ctrl-x or Alt-ctrl-x, depending on the browser) to bring up a pop-up window with clickable characters. The default character set is “IPA Extensions”, but others are easily selectable from a drop-down menu in the pop-up window.
Here are some partial screenshots (from my Mac, running Firefox 2). The first two show what you see when you activate the plugin using the HTML editor in WordPress 2.5, which looks the same when activated in the comment text entry field. The first image shows the pop-up window in its default state, and the second shows some of the options selectable from the drop-down menu.
Note the “charpal” button in the toolbar (should show up at the end of the toolbar in bigger windows) — this is an alternative to the shortcut key, but is not available from the comment text entry field.
These next two images show what you see when you activate the plugin using the Visual editor in WordPress 2.5. Again, the first image shows the pop-up window in its default state, and the second shows some of the options selectable from the drop-down menu. This time, note the “IPA 93” button in the toolbar, which is again an alternative to the shortcut key.
[ Click here for the official announcement. ]