Quick Key allows you to group characters into personalized sets, and save them to disk.

Usage

Quick Key can’t fit all 65,000 characters on your screen at the same time, so they
are organized in to logical groups called “charsets”. These are saved as .charset
files, and are used and modified in the Character Grid.

By creating personalized character sets you will save yourself time and screen space.
Smaller, more focused groups are easier to manage, and are faster to respond
Although Quick Key can display charsets with more than a few hundred characters,
it can become unresponsive for long periods of time.

Included Charsets

To load a character set, click File > Open on the Toolbar, and choose
a charset. Quick Key includes about 220 charsets.

Directories

• By Language
  Character sets by category
• By Font
  Font-specific character sets
• All
  All 65,000 chracters, split into 1024 chraracter groups
• View Filters
  Can be used in conjunction with charsets to apply filters.
• Text Styles
  Similar to View Filters, but these overlay formatting when opened instead.

Files

• Ascii
  The 256 characters that are almost universally supported
• <Language>
  Language-optimized character groups. Contains only
  the freqently used characters for each language.

Making your own charsets

Although many charsets are included by default, you may wish to create your own.
The recommended procedure for this is to start with a larger character set that
already has most of the characters you need, and then delete the unnecessary ones. If
you find yourself needing a character that is not in the provided sets, press
Ctrl-Shift-U to add characters by decimal or hexadecimal code. Another
feature found in the Tools menu of the Toolbar
is the Edit Characters as Text dialog box, where the list of characters
is placed into a normal text box for regular editing. Note, however, that text boxes
display characters differently than the character grid does. Some characters (combining
marks) are displayed over preceding characters, and some are only visible as squares.

Tips: To quickly create a charset from an existing one, choose
New Copy of this Charset from the File menu. If
you are in possession of a document that already contains the characters you need,
use Import from File. Use this to drag and drop (right mouse button)
text selections to the character grid.

Help Wanted

Help us out! You can make your donation to the Quick Key project in the form of
a charset. The Unicode standard defines tens of thousands of characters, and we
are a long way from organizing all those into really useful groups. Please
email us the characters sets you have customized to help you with your job;
we will upload them to this page for everyone to enjoy. With each new release these
files will be included.

Filtering Character Categories

Filters may cause some headaches, but I think once you get used to them they will
come in handy. Filters are categories of characters, defined by the Unicode standard,
which can be used selectively to narrow the number of characters you see in the
Character Grid. For example, by default, characters in the
categories Format, Control, Private Use, Other Not Assigned, Other Number,
and Surrogate are hidden. These characters are unlikely to be used
by anybody but a software developer or systems administrator. Your filter selections
will be saved with your character set, but you can turn this off in the File
menu. Character set files can contain any combination of Font Settings,
Filters, and Characters. When a character set
is opened and it does not contain one of these categories of information, the font
settings, filters, and even characters are used from the last character set, essentially
merging the two. Filter settings are found in the Filters menu
on the Toolbar Form.

Picking a Font

Most fonts only support a small subset of the available characters;
for the rest they display a generic rectangle.
Arial Unicode MS supports an amazing selection of the Unicode specification.
It contains 51,180 glyphs, and is bundled with Microsoft Word. I recommend that
you use this font as much as possible while working with Quick Key, so that you
can view the largest number of characters. Keep in mind, however, which font the
destination application is using, as this will determine the result.

All fonts are different

In Quick Key, all characters will be displayed using whatever font is currently
selected in the Toolbar. You may notice that when a character is transferred to
another application, the appearance or shape of the character changes. This is because
Quick Key and the destination application are using different fonts to render the
character. If both fonts are correctly designed, and use the
Unicode standard, the only change should be the style of the character.
If a completely different character appears, you are using a non-standard font in
either Quick Key or the application. Always use a standardized font to ensure
sure that the document will be readable in the future. If in doubt, change the
font to Times New Roman and verify that the letters appear correctly.
As Quick Key does not transfer font information along with characters, I recommend that
you set the font to Arial Unicode MS and leave it there. This eliminates
any confusion you may have when opening a charset and seeing
rectangles.

The Toolbar

Here you can load a different character set, save one you have modified, or change
how characters are displayed. Keywords and
Filters are controlled here. To display the toolbar, right click the
Character Grid title bar or the system tray icon, and
choose Toolbar.

Character Grid

The character grid is what you will use when sending characters to other applications.
Most functions can be accessed by right-clicking objects in this window. The title
bar menu allows you to modify appearance, functionality, and open a recently used
charset. You will also notice the two icons next to the close button. These enable
the auto-hide and lock features respectively. The character grid displays all characters
in the current charset that match the currently selected filters.
To move characters around, click the Drag mouse button (left) on
a character.

Although using right-click menus to deal with characters one-by-one is often sufficient,
you may need to make mass deletions or modifications that require a more powerful
method. To do this, open the Toolbar, the click Tools>Edit
Characters as Text. Now you can perform modifications on selections
of characters.

Legacy charsets

If you have a version of Quick Key released before January 24, 2006, please avoid
the following character sets. These character sets are extremely large, and unsuitable for viewing in
Quick Key. These were generated by an automatic utility.

• Unicode Ranges\CJK Unified Ideograph Extension A.charset
• Unicode Ranges\Chars (31,130-42,124).charset
• Unicode Ranges\Chars (1-31,129).charset
• Unicode Ranges\Hangul.charset
• Unicode Ranges\Private Use Area.charset
• Unicode Ranges\Yi & Yi Radicals.charset
• Symbols\Mathematical Operators.charset
• Symbols\Daash Punctuation.charset
• Languages\Times New Roman\Times New Roman.charset

These have been left in newer versions because they are useful, but will display a warning.

• Fonts\Times New Roman.charset
• Fonts\Microsoft Sans Serif.charset
• Fonts\Courier New.charset