accented characters from the keyboard

[PleegWat]

On 12/05/2011 11:12 PM, Udvarias Ur wrote:
> Is there some way of entering accented characters from the keyboard?
>
> In Windows I used to hold down the Alt key and enter ASCII decimal
> number for the character I wanted. i.e.  Alt + 130 to get an é. That
> does not work in any of my apps, Thunderbird, or forms in Firefox.
> Liberoffice and Thunderbird have menus for this but they are a pain in
> the rear and take ages relative to the keyboard.

I don't know if you can enable that method of entering accented 
characters. I do know of two others.

Firstly, you could set your keyboard to 'English (US. International with 
dead keys)'. However, in my opinion, that's even more annoying than the 
windows version.

Secondly, you can configure a key on your keyboard as 'Compose key'. To 
do this, on the keyboard layout configuration screen, press the 
'Options...' button, and under 'Compose key position' select one or more 
keys. This allows you to enter all kinds of characters by pressing the 
compose key followed by a number of other keys. For your example: 
Compose, ', e or Compose, e, ' give é.

Finally, Ubuntu has a character map similar to the one for windows. This 
can be convenient for symbols you hardly ever use, and aren't accessible 
using the dead keys or compose key methods.

PleegWat