I am trying to use xbindkeys to insert the "∃" character with a keyboard shortcut. The following doesn't work:
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '∃'"
control + shift + 3
Instead, it sends "â".
I don't have a fix, but at least a partial explanation: Linux uses UTF-8 encoding for Unicode characters, so the "∃" character is represented by three bytes \342\210\203. In ISO-8859-1, the byte \342 represents the character "â", and \210 and \203 represent (unprintable) control characters. It seems that there is at least one tool – xbindkeys, xvkbd, the X server, the application in which you want to insert the character, or whatever – that interprets your three-byte sequence as ISO-8859-1. That means, this tool either doesn't understand UTF-8 at all, or it is not configured to understand UTF-8 (i.e., its so-called locale is ISO-8859-1 rather than UTF-8). Unfortunately, I can't tell you which tool is the culprit.
Does copying and pasting the "∃" character using the mouse work, or does it fail as well?
xbindkeys
instead of XCompose? This is exactly what XCompose is meant for. – HalosGhost Oct 21 '14 at 16:02