Typing accented characters

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 08:48:51PM -0400, William O'Higgins wrote:
> I recently switched my system to Unicode, and in general I'm pretty
> pleased with the results - I can see accents in my terminal, which makes
> me happy.
> 
> The downside is that right now I'm using us_intl as my keyboard map,
> which means I can type accented characters, but I have dead keys which
> need escaping (I know of the caret, backtick, single and double quotes so
> far, but there are probably others I haven't discovered yet).  I'm
> wondering, is there a way I can use a meta-key to trigger these dead
> keys selectively, or some other means that doesn't require restarting
> the X server?

What do you mean by dead keys?  Does your keyboard actually have the
labels on it for us_intl?  Most non-plain-us keyboards use the right alt
key to access additional characters on many keys.

Personally I have prefered in the past to leave the keyboard as plain us
since that's what it has on the keytops, and define the useless windows
menu key (next to right control) as compose.  Then I can use compose to
conbine characters into the character I want.  xmodmap should be able to
define the key as compose for you.  There are lots of places with
information on using compose in X as well.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml