Typing foreign characters without installing keyboard layouts

Question

Reported by a customer we had some issues with special characters that were outside the ISO-8859-1 code page.

Since I learned Chinese for three years, I could personally reproduce the issue by installing the Pinyin keyboard layout and just typing a few Chinese words. But finally, this may be disturbing, since you get the Windows language bar and pressing key combinations like Ctrl+Space (which are often used in software development) toggle between layouts.

Other solutions could be

• typing Alt+NumPad numbers (hard to remember + not that easy to type on Notebooks without a numeric block)
• copy/paste special characters (open Word or Internet first)

All those solutions do not seem perfect to me. I'm looking for a solution that

• has easier key combinations than Alt+NumPad
• needs no additional opening of a program like a symbol table
• does not add languages to the Windows language bar and does not conflict with programmer keys (ideally it's configurable)
• works on Windows
• is gratis, open source preferred

Answer 1

I found WinCompose [GitHub] that fulfills my needs.

• has a configurable "compose" key which I'll refer to as ♥ in the following. I'm using Pause now.
• has a total of 2200 combinations and they are easier to remember than NumLock numbers, e.g. ♥<- for the Unicode arrow ← or ♥e" for the diaeresis e: ë
• has no impact on the language bar and on Ctrl+Space (at least as long as you don't use Ctrl as the combine key)
• is open source and gratis
• works on Windows 7 x64 SP1 (and probably others)