Typing multilingual European characters with US keyboard?

[Magnus Therning]

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 09:41:05PM +0100, David Marsh wrote:
>What's the best way to go about setting up the keyboard to be able to
>enter characters from other languages?

I like the GNOME keyboard system applet. I don't use any KDE apps
though, so I don't know anything about getting them to play nicely with
GNOME.

>US English
>US English with deadkeys (us_intl) [KDE]
>US English International with deadkeys [GNOME]
>US English with deadkeys [GNOME]
>US English with ISO9995-3
>US English with ISO9995-3 (Eliminate dead keys) [GNOME]  ?

Well, what do you want? I personally find dead keys confusing, mostly
because the other computers I use (at work) don't have them, and I keep
on making typos in one place or the other... :-)

>Which of these do I want to select?

I'm using U.S. English.

>And then, how do I actually type additional characters?
>My poking around has suggested that there are at least two ways: 
>either using a 'compose' key (I think I'd use <right-logo>) and then
>typing the two characters needed (a bit like vim digraphs), or
>converting the quote/double-quote key into an accent key (key the
>accent, and then key the letter to match - but this won't match all
>additional characters and seems to make it difficult/impossible to type
>a plain quote or double quote by themselves).

The first way, compose key, is what I use and like best. Some characters
require a bit of finger-twisting to produce but the ones I use most
often are easy enough (å ä ö Å Ä Ö).

The second way is deadkeys. It's a nice way to compose if you use
accented characters often. It is not impossible to create a plain
double-quote, just press space! (I like to think that with dead keys you
place a character under an accent, an i under a " creates ï, so a space
under a " creates a ".)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

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