Keyboard text - how get basic encoding? Not UTF-8? Not US-Intl? "%20" not space. Where change after install? KUbuntu ; jor KUbuntu

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Thursday 29 July 2010, giovanni_re wrote:
<snip>

> I've been installing Linuxes for more than 10 years.  I don't know
> what has changed, but recently, on the above mentioned laptop, I
> wasn't able, with several different install attempts, to get just
> the regular simple (ASCII?) text encoding setup.

a) The keyboard has nothing at all to do with a file's encoding.
b) The fact that most everybody uses UTF-8 nowadays makes defaulting
   to UTF-8 a good thing - you shouldn't change this unless you know
   what you're doing. And - forgive my bluntness - you don't seem to.

<snip>

> Anyway, with the current install, I have to type '" ' - {double
> quote, space} to get a single double quote character to appear. 
> If I press the double quote key twice in a row, I get something
> like a slightly different than normal double quote character
> appearing in the text - perhaps thinner, or italicized?

This would be either due to your input method (SCIM, etc.) or 
keyboard layout. I'm not familiar with US keyboard layouts, but in my 
German layout, I need to enable the "nodeadkeys" option to get rid of 
this behaviour. You might play with the available options a little to 
find out which is appropriate.

> And, often a "space" character, entered into a file name for file
> save in firefox, will wind up like something like "%20" in the
> file name.

Since some characters - like spaces - can't occur in URLs, they have 
to be escaped. "%20" is the escape sequence for a space. If your FF 
does this when you save files, that would be a bug and should be 
reported.

<snip>

> What is a one sentence description of the essence of this keyboard
> issue?

Seeing as how you apparently have three issues...

Executing "kcmshell4 keyboard_layout" will allow you to fiddle with 
your keyboard layout options.

  --Reinhold