Insert Glyph as first character not supported

[jongleur]

With the text tool I wanted to add a greek letter to annotate a diagram.

I select the text tool, click on the canvas and choose the target glyph in the glyph dialog (opened by Text/Glyphen (german interface)).
Double click on the glyph leads to it being copied into the text field in the glyph dialog, but the Add-Button next to it ("Hinzufügen" in the German interface) stays disabled.
BUT: I can type as usual with the keyboard on the canvas, and:
After at least one letter is in the text field, the "Hinzufügen"-Button is enabled and works as expected.

Affected versions are at least:
0.48.3.1 r9886 on ubuntu 12.04
and a windows version (not sure which one; my girlfriend pointed me to the bug; will investigate the version and report it in the evening)

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Currently, the glyph can only be appended to an existing text [1], but it would be nice to be able to create a new text object based on the selection in the glyph dialog, or prepend/insert the glyph at the current cursor position (if the text tool is active).

[1] «Click the Append button to add the characters to a selected text object. Note that you must have already created a text object. A text object is not created until at least one character has been entered»
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Creating.html#id1174697>

[jongleur (wendorff)]

Hi.
Thanks for reviewing.
As a coder myself I agree that technically it's more a whishlist item, an unsupported feature.
As a coder myself I understand why it might be different.

From a users point of view it's definitively a bug.
From a users point of view a text field with an empty text might exist - at least, as long as the cursor is blinking on the canvas, I consider that as an existing text field.

To get a text field only containing e.g. a theta glyph, I therefore have the following options currently:
1) type any other character, select theta in the glyphs dialog, insert it, press LEFT, delete the space again.
2) select the theta in the glyphs dialog, copy it to the clipboard (e.g. by Ctrl+C), create a new text field (from a users point of view, as it's technically no textfield as long as there's no text; to be clear: click on the canvas after selecting the text tool), and insert it by Ctrl+V again.

It's strange, that adding a character using the glyph dialog is not possible - I would have suggested that it's nothing different from the second variant; it appends a string to the given String (while the empty string is not equal to NULL)