Typing vowels with macrons

[Pierfrancesco Caci]

:-> "Kent" == Kent Frazier <kentfrazier at gmail.com> writes:

    > Hello all.
    > I am a student of languages, and I need to be able to produce the
    > accented characters of the languages I study.  The international
    > layout works for most of these, but I am studying Latin, and I need to
    > be able to produce vowels with macrons.

Vale :-)

    > Does anyone on here know of a way I can create vowels with macrons (a
    > solid line over the vowel, e.g. āēīōū) under Linux/Gnome short of
    > using character map?  The international layout with deadkeys does not
    > have a way to do this as far as I am aware.

You must define a key to act as a compose key. I'm not on ubuntu right
now so my memory will sure give you an incorrect result, but you get a
start.

Find the keyboard property configurator in the "computer" menu,
click on the "layout options" tab, expand the multiple choices in the
right panel that start with "compose". Add one of them to the left
panel. I usually choose the "menu" key, or the right alt if I don't
have those useless windows keys on the keyboard. 

To use it, you press and release in sequence the compose key and the
letters you want to combine. I don't remember right now the sequence
to generate macron, but you get the full list in 

/usr/share/keymaps/include/compose.latin.inc.gz

For example, to get á (a with accent) you press: compose ' a

(or something like that. Again, I'm on debian now, don't know if the
path in ubuntu has been changed. It shouldn't)

    > Under Windows XP, I was able to accomplish this by using the Maori
    > keyboard layout.  It was pretty much identical to the standard U.S.
    > English layout except the ` key (directly above tab) was replaced with
    > a deadkey that allowed me to put macrons over vowels.  Maori layout
    > does not seem to be available under the Gnome Keyboard Layout chooser.
    >  Does anyone know of another layout with macrons or a way to produce
    > them without having to dig through character map each time?


The "dead key" is another option that I personally hate. You should
have the possibility to select an US-international with dead keys from
the same gnome tool. I love compose though. 

All this stuff will also work in xterm if you are in UTF-8 (which is
true by default for hoary but not for warty).

Pf

-- 

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 Pierfrancesco Caci | ik5pvx | mailto:p.caci at tin.it  -  http://gusp.dyndns.org
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