Re: OT: Need howto info for typing accented chars on US keyboard in Linux

On Sunday 13 January 2013 02:19:57 Julian Bradfield wrote:
> On 2013-01-13, Leslie Turriff <jlturriff_at_centurytel.net> wrote:
> > I've been searching the web for information about how to type accented
> > characters (French) using a US 104-key keyboard. I understand that a
> > compose key is involved, but everything I've found so far has involved
> > adding character<=>key mappings using xmodmap, whereas it appears that
> > one does not need to do that; but there seems to be an assumption that
> > just saying "press the compose key and..." magic happens.
>
> As others have said, most modern distributions are set up to do this
> by default.
> The thing to beware of is that GTK+, the toolkit used by many
> applications such as Firefox etc., does its own thing with compose
> processing, rather than relying on the underlying X processing.
> (Sadly typical of GTK+.)
> So if you succeed in working out how to change the X mappings (which
> is not trivial), it won't work with GTK+ applications.
        I just found that out with regards to LibreOffice; and so far I haven't found
anything in their docs that mentions it.
        I have successfully used the xmodmap method to map box characters onto the
numeric keypad (which I otherwise don't use), but they don't have that effect
in LibreOffice, and their docs interface seems to only cover remapping of
non-glyph keys. Using the compose or deadkey methods for this purpose is not
much faster than cut&paste from kcharselect. :-)

> Emacs also has its own facility, but it also uses the native X compose
> mappings before its own.
>
> In summary, if your needs are just commonplace accents, it should just
> work, and in most cases the compose sequences are obvious, and if
> they're not, they're in the Wikipedia article.
Received on Sun Jan 13 2013 - 12:40:55 CST